The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About
the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas
for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.

All other sections in this Literature Study Guide are owned and copyrighted by BookRags, Inc.

Table of Contents

Page 1

A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY

I am not writing this preface for the conscious fool,
but for his self-deceived brother who considers himself
a very wise person. My hope is that some persons
may recognise themselves and be provided with food
for thought. They will usually be people who have
contributed little to this war, except mean views and
endless talk. Had they shared the sacrifice of
it, they would have developed within themselves the
faculty for a wider generosity. The extraordinary
thing about generosity is its eagerness to recognise
itself in others.

You find these untravelled critics and mischief-makers
on both sides of the Atlantic. In most cases
they have no definite desire to work harm, but they
have inherited cantankerous prejudices which date back
to the American Revolution, and they lack the vision
to perceive that this war, despite its horror and
tragedy, is the God-given chance of centuries to re-unite
the great Anglo-Saxon races of the world in a truer
bond of kindness and kinship. If we miss this
chance we are flinging in God’s face His splendid
recompense for our common heroism.

It is an unfortunate fact that the merely foolish
person constitutes as grave a danger as the deliberate
plotter. His words, if they are acid enough,
are quoted and re-quoted. They pass from mouth
to mouth, gaining in authority. By the time they
reach the friendly country at which they are directed,
they have taken on the appearance of an opinion representative
of a nation. The Hun is well aware of the value
of gossip for the encouraging of divided counsels among
his enemies. He invents a slander, pins it to
some racial grievance, confides it to the fools among
the Allies and leaves them to do the rest. Some
of them wander about in a merely private capacity,
nagging without knowledge, depositing poison, breeding
doubts as to integrity, and all the while pretending
to maintain a mildly impartial and judicial mental
attitude. Their souls never rise from the ground.
Their brains are gangrenous with memories of cancelled
malice. They suspect hero-worship; it smacks
to them of sentiment. They examine, but never
praise. Being incapable of sacrifice, they find
something meretriciously melodramatic about men and
nations who are capable. Had they lived nineteen
hundred years ago, they would have haunted Calvary
to discover fraud.

Then, there are others, by far more dangerous.
These make their appearance daily in the morning press,
thrusting their pessimisms across our breakfast tables,
beleaguering our faith with ill-natured judgements
and querulous warnings. One of our London Dailies,
for instance, specializes in annoying America; it
works as effectively to breed distrust as if its policy
were dictated from Berlin.

Page 2

I have just returned from a prolonged tour of America’s
activities in France. Wherever I went I heard
nothing but unstinted appreciation of Great Britain’s
surpassing gallantry: “We never knew that
you Britishers were what you are; you never told us.
We had to come over here to find out.”
When that had been said I always waited, for I guessed
the qualifying statement that would follow: “There’s
only one thing that makes us mad. Why the devil
does your censor allow the P——­ to
sneer at us every morning? Your army doesn’t
feel that way towards us; at least, if it ever did,
it doesn’t now. Are there really people
in England who—?”

At this point I would cut my questioner short:
“There are men so short-sighted in every country
that, to warm their hands, they would burn the crown
of thorns. You have them in America. Such
men are not representative.”

The purpose of this book is to tell what America has
done, is doing, and, on the strength of her splendid
and accomplished facts, to plead for a closer friendship
between my two countries. As an Englishman who
has lived in the States for ten years and is serving
with the Canadian Forces, I feel that I have a sympathetic
understanding of the affections and aloofnesses of
both nations; as a member of both families I claim
the domestic right of indulging in a little plain
speaking to each in turn.

In my appeal I leave the fighting men out of the question.
Death is a universal teacher of charity. At the
end of the war the men who survive will acknowledge
no kinship save the kinship of courage. To have
answered the call of duty and to have played the man,
will make a closer bond than having been born of the
same mother. At a New York theatre last October
I met some French officers who had fought on the right
of the Canadian Corps frontage at the Somme. We
got to talking, commenced remembering, missed the
entire performance and parted as old friends.
In France I stayed with an American-Irish Division.
They were for the most part American citizens in the
second generation: few of them had been to Ireland.
As frequently happens, they were more Irish than the
Irish. They had learned from their parents the
abuses which had driven them to emigrate, but had
no knowledge of the reciprocal provocations which
had caused the abuses. Consequently, when they
sailed on their troop-ships for France they were anti-British
almost to a man—­many of them were theoretically
Sinn Feiners. They were coming to fight for France
and for Lafayette, who had helped to lick Britain—­but
not for the British. By the time I met them they
were marvellously changed. They were going into
the line almost any day and—­this was what
had worked the change—­they had been trained
for their ordeal by British N.C.O.’s and officers.
They had swamped their hatred and inherited bitterness
in admiration. Their highest hope was that they
might do as well as the British. “They’re
men if you like,” they said. In the imminence

Page 3

of death, their feeling for these old-timers, who
had faced death so often, amounted to hero-worship.
It was good to hear them deriding the caricature of
the typical Briton, which had served in their mental
galleries as an exact likeness for so many years.
It was proof to me that men who have endured the same
hell in a common cause will be nearer in spirit, when
the war is ended, than they are to their own civilian
populations. For in all belligerent countries
there are two armies fighting—­the military
and the civilian; either can let the other down.
If the civilian army loses its morale, its
vision, its unselfishness, and allows itself to be
out-bluffed by the civilian army of Germany, it as
surely betrays its soldiers as if it joined forces
with the Hun. We execute soldiers for cowardice;
it’s a pity that the same law does not govern
the civilian army. There would be a rapid revision
in the tone of more than one English and American
newspaper. A soldier is shot for cowardice because
his example is contagious. What can be more contagious
than a panic statement or a doubt daily reiterated?
Already there are many of us who have a kindlier feeling
and certainly more respect for a Boche who fights
gamely, than for a Britisher or American who bickers
and sulks in comfort. Only one doubt as to ultimate
victory ever assails the Western Front: that it
may be attacked in the rear by the premature peace
negotiations of the civil populations it defends.
Should that ever happen, the Western Front would cease
to be a mixture of French, Americans, Canadians, Australians,
British and Belgians; it would become a nation by itself,
pledged to fight on till the ideals for which it set
out to fight are definitely established.

We get rather tired of reading speeches in which civilians
presume that the making of peace is in their hands.
The making may be, but the acceptance is in ours.
I do not mean that we love war for war’s sake.
We love it rather less than the civilian does.
When an honourable peace has been confirmed, there
will be no stauncher pacifist than the soldier; but
we reserve our pacifism till the war is won. We
shall be the last people in Europe to get war-weary.
We started with a vision—­the achieving
of justice; we shall not grow weary till that vision
has become a reality. When one has faced up to
an ultimate self-denial, giving becomes a habit.
One becomes eager to be allowed to give all—­to
keep none of life’s small change. The fury
of an ideal enfevers us. We become fanatical
to outdo our own best record in self-surrender.
Many of us, if we are alive when peace is declared,
will feel an uneasy reproach that perhaps we did not
give enough.

This being the spirit of our soldiers, it is easy
to understand their contempt for those civilians who
go on strike, prate of weariness, scream their terror
when a few Hun planes sail over London, devote columns
in their papers to pin-prick tragedies of food-shortage,
and cloud the growing generosity between England and
America by cavilling criticisms and mean reflections.
Their contempt is not that of the fighter for the
man of peace; but the scorn of the man who is doing
his duty for the shirker.

Page 4

A Tommy is reading a paper in a muddy trench.
Suddenly he scowls, laughs rather fiercely and calls
to his pal, jerking his head as a sign to him to hurry.
“’Ere Bill, listen to wot this ’ere
cry-baby says. ‘E thinks we’re losin’
the bloomin’ war ’cause ’e didn’t
get an egg for breakfast. Losin’ the war!
A lot ‘e knows abart it. A blinkin’
lot ’e’s done either to win or lose it.
Yus, I don’t think! Thank Gawd, we’ve
none of ’is sort up front.”

To men who have gazed for months with the eyes of
visionaries on sudden death, it comes as a shock to
discover that back there, where life is so sweetly
certain, fear still strides unabashed. They had
thought that fear was dead—­stifled by heroism.
They had believed that personal littleness had given
way before the magnanimity of martyrdom.

In this plea, then, for a firmer Anglo-American friendship
I address the civilian populations of both countries.
The fate of such a friendship is in their hands.
In the Eden of national destinies God is walking;
yet there are those who bray their ancient grievances
so loudly that they all but drown the sound of His
footsteps.

Being an Englishman it will be more courteous to commence
with the fools of my own flesh and blood. Let
me paint a contrast.

Last October I sailed back from New York with a company
of American officers; they consisted in the main of
trained airmen, Navy experts and engineers. Before
my departure the extraordinary sternness of America,
her keenness to rival her allies in self-denial, her
willing mobilisation of all her resources, had confirmed
my optimism gained in the trenches, that the Allies
must win; the mere thought of compromise was impossible
and blasphemous. This optimism was enhanced on
the voyage by the conduct of the officers who were
my companions. They carried their spirit of dedication
to an excess that was almost irksome. They refused
to play cards. They were determined not to relax.
Every minute they could snatch was spent in studying
text-books. Their country had come into the war
so late that they resented any moment lost from making
themselves proficient. When expostulated with
they explained themselves by saying, “When we’ve
done our bit it will be time to amuse ourselves.”
They were dull company, but, in a time of war, inspiring.
All their talk was of when they reached England.
Their enthusiasm for the Britisher was such that they
expected to be swept into a rarer atmosphere by the
closer contact with heroism.

We had an Englishman with us—­obviously
a consumptive. He typified for them the doggedness
of British pluck. He had been through the entire
song and dance of the Mexican Revolution; a dozen times
he had been lined up against a wall to be shot.
From Mexico he had escaped to New York, hoping to
be accepted by the British military authorities.
Not unnaturally he had been rejected. The purpose
of his voyage to the Old Country was to try his luck
with the Navy. He held his certificate as a highly
qualified marine engineer. No one could persuade
him that he was not wanted. “I could last
six months,” he said, “it would be something.
Heaps of chaps don’t last as long.”

Page 5

This man, a crock in every sense, hurrying back to
help his country, symbolised for every American aboard
the unconquerable courage of Great Britain. If
you hadn’t the full measure of years to give,
give what was left, even though it were but six months.
I may add that in England his services were accepted.
His persistence refused to be disregarded. When
red-tape stopped his progress, he used back-stairs
strategy. No one could bar him from his chance
of serving.

In believing that he represented the Empire at its
best, my Americans were not mistaken. There are
thousands fighting to-day who share his example.
One is an ex-champion sculler of Oxford; even in those
days he was blind as a bat. His subsequent performance
is consistent with his record; we always knew that
he had guts. At the start of the war, he tried
to enlist and was turned down on the score of eyesight.
He tried four times with no better result. The
fifth time he presented himself he was fool-proof;
he had learnt the eyesight tests by heart. He
went out a year ago as a “one pip artist”—­a
second lieutenant. Within ten months he had become
a captain and was acting lieutenant-colonel of his
battalion, all the other officers having been killed
or wounded. At Cambrai he did such gallant work
that he was personally congratulated by the general
of his division. These American officers had
heard such stories; they regarded England with a kind
of worship. As men who hoped to be brave but were
untested, they found something mystic and well-nigh
incredible in such utter courage. The consumptive
racing across the Atlantic that he might do something
for England before death took him, made this spirit
real to them.

We travelled to London as a party and there for a
time we held together. The night before several
set out for France, we had a farewell gathering.
The consumptive, who had just obtained his commission,
was in particularly high feather; he brought with him
a friend, a civilian official in the Foreign Office.
Please picture the group: all men who had come
from distant parts of the world to do one job; men
in the army, navy, and flying service; every one in
uniform except the stranger.

Talk developed along the line of our absolute certainty
as to complete and final victory. The civilian
stranger commenced to raise his voice in dissent.
We disputed his statements. He then set to work
to run through the entire argument of pessimism:
America was too far away to be effective; Russia was
collapsing; France was exhausted; England had reached
the zenith of her endeavour; Italy was not united in
purpose. On every front he saw a black cloud
rising and took a dyspeptic’s delight in describing
it as a little blacker than he saw it. There was
an apostolic zeal about the man’s dreary earnestness.
He spoke with that air of authority which is not uncommon
with civilian Government officials. The Americans
stared rather than listened; this was not the mystic
and utter courage which they had expected to find well-nigh
incredible. Their own passion far out-topped it.

Page 6

The argument reached a sudden climax. There were
wounded officers present. One of them said, “You
wouldn’t speak that way if you had the foggiest
conception of the kind of chaps we have in the trenches.”

“It makes no difference what kind they are,”
the pessimist replied intolerantly. “I’m
asking you to face facts. Because you’ve
succeeded in an attack, you soldiers seem to think
that the war is ended. You base your arguments
all the time on your little local knowledge of your
own particular front.”

The discussion ceased abruptly. Every one sprang
up. Voices strove together in advising this “facer
of facts” to get into khaki and to go to where
he could obtain precisely the same kind of little
local knowledge—­perhaps, a few wounds as
well. His presence was dishonourable—­contaminating.
We filed out and left him sitting humped in a chair,
looking puzzled and pathetic, murmuring, “But
I thought I was among friends.”

My last clear-cut recollection is of a chubby young
American Naval Airman standing over him, with clenched
fists, passionately instructing him in the spiritual
geography of America. That’s one type of
fool; the type who specialises in catastrophe; the
type who in eternally facing up to facts, takes no
account of that magic quality, courage, which can
make one man more terrible than an army; the type
who is so profoundly well-informed, about externals,
that he ignores the mightiness of soul that can remould
externals to spiritual purposes. Were I a German,
the spectacle of that solitary consumptive leaving
the climate which meant life to him and hastening home
to give just six months of service to his country,
would be more menacing than the loss of an entire
corps frontage.

And there’s the type who can’t forget;
he suffers from a fundamental lack of generosity.
The Englishman of this type can’t refrain from
quoting such phrases as, “Too proud to fight,”
whenever opportunity offers. His American counterpart
insists that he is not fighting for Great Britain,
but for the French. He makes himself offensive
by silly talk about sister republics, implying that
all other forms of Government are essentially tyrannic.
He never loses an opportunity to mention Lafayette,
assuming that one French man is worth ten Britishers.
A very gross falsehood is frequently on the lips of
this sort of man; he doesn’t know where he picked
it up and has never troubled to test its accuracy.
I can tell him where it originated; at Berlin in the
bureau for Hun propaganda. Every time he utters
it he is helping the enemy. This falsehood is
to the effect that Great Britain has conserved her
man-power; that in the early days she let Frenchmen
do the fighting and that now she is marking time till
Americans are ready to die in her stead. This
statement is so stupendously untrue that it goes unheeded
by those who know the empty homes of England or have
witnessed the gallantry of our piled-up dead.

Page 7

Then there’s the jealous fool—­the
fool who in England will see no reason why this book
should have been published. His line of argument
will be, “We’ve been in this war for more
than three years. We’ve done everything
that America is doing; because she’s new to the
game, we’re doing it much better. We don’t
want any one to appreciate us, so why go praising
her?” Precisely. Why be decent? Why
seek out affections? Why be polite or kindly?
Why not be automatons? I suppose the answer is,
“Because we happen to be men, and are privileged
temporarily to be playing in the role of heroes.
The heroic spirit rather educates one to hold out
the hand of friendship to new arrivals of the same
sort.”

There is one type of fool, exclusively American, whose
stupidity arises from love and tenderness. Very
often she is a woman. She has been responsible
for the arrival in France of a number of narrow-minded
and well-intentioned persons; their errand is to investigate
vice-conditions in the U.S. Army. This suspicion
of the women at home concerning the conduct of their
men in the field, is directly traceable to reports
of the debasing influences of war set in circulation
by the anti-militarists. I want to say emphatically
that cleaner, more earnest, better protected troops
than those from the United States are not to be found
in Europe. Both in Great Britain and on the Continent
their puritanism has created a deep impression.
By their idealism they have made their power felt;
they are men with a vision in their eyes, who have
travelled three thousand miles to keep a rendezvous
with death. That those for whom they are prepared
to die should suspect them is a degrading disloyalty.
That trackers should be sent after them from home
to pick up clues to their unworthiness is sheerly
damnable. To disparage the heroism of other nations
is bad enough; to distrust the heroes of your own
flesh and blood, attributing to them lower than civilian
moral standards, is to be guilty of the meanest treachery
and ingratitude.

Here, then, are some of the sample fools to whom this
preface is addressed. The list could be indefinitely
lengthened. “The fool hath said in his
heart, ’There is no God’.” He
says it in many ways and takes a long while in saying
it; but the denying of God is usually the beginning
and the end of his conversation. He denies the
vision of God in his fellow-men and fellow-nations,
even when the spikes of the cross are visibly tearing
wounds in their feet and hands.

Life has swung back to a primitive decision since
the war commenced. The decision is the same for
both men and nations. They can choose the world
or achieve their own souls. They can cast mercenary
lots for the raiment of a crucified righteousness
or take up their martyrdom as disciples. Those
men and nations who have been disciples together can
scarcely fail to remain friends when the tragedy is
ended. What the fool says in his heart at this
present is not of any lasting importance. There
will always be those who mock, offering vinegar in
the hour of agony and taunting, “If thou be what
thou sayest....” But in the comradeship
of the twilit walk to Emmaus neither the fool nor
the mocker are remembered.

Page 8

OUT TO WIN

I

“We’vegotfouryears”

The American Troops have set words to one of their
bugle calls. These words are indicative of their
spirit—­of the calculated determination
with which they have faced up to their adventure:
an adventure unparalleled for magnitude in the history
of their nation.

They fall in in two ranks. They tell off from
the right in fours. “Move to the right
in fours. Quick March,” comes the order.
The bugles strike up. The men swing into column
formation, heads erect and picking up the step.
To the song of the bugles they chant words as they
march. “We’ve got four years to do
this job. We’ve got four years to do this
job.”

That is the spirit of America. Her soldiers give
her four years, but to judge from the scale of her
preparations she might be planning for thirty.

America is out to win. I write this opening sentence
in Paris where I am temporarily absent from my battery,
that I may record the story of America’s efforts
in France. My purpose is to prove with facts that
America is in the war to her last dollar, her last
man, and for just as long as Germany remains unrepentant.
Her strength is unexpended, her spirit is un-war-weary.
She has a greater efficient man-power for her population
than any nation that has yet entered the arena of
hostilities. Her resources are continental rather
than national; it is as though a new and undivided
Europe had sprung to arms in moral horror against
Germany. She has this to add fierceness to her
soul—­the reproach that she came in too late.
That reproach is being wiped out rapidly by the scarlet
of self-imposed sacrifice. She did come in late—­for
that very reason she will be the last of Germany’s
adversaries to withdraw.

She did not want to come in at all. Many of her
hundred million population emigrated to her shores
out of hatred of militarism and to escape from just
such a hell as is now raging in Europe. At first
it seemed a far cry from Flanders to San Francisco.
Philanthropy could stretch that far, but not the risking
of human lives. Moreover, the American nation
is not racially a unit; it is bound together by its
ideal quest for peaceful and democratic institutions.
It was a difficult task for any government to convince
so remote a people that their destiny was being made
molten in the furnace of the Western Front; when once
that truth was fully apprehended the diverse souls
of America leapt up as one soul and declared for war.
In so doing the people of the United States forewent
the freedom from fear that they had gained by their
journey across the Atlantic; they turned back in their
tracks to smite again with renewed strength and redoubled
hate the old brutal Fee-Fo-Fum of despotism, from
whose clutches they thought they had escaped.

Page 9

America’s is the case of The Terrible Meek;
for two and a half years she lulled Germany and astonished
the Allies by her abnormal patience. The most
terrifying warriors of history have been peace-loving
nations hounded into hostility by outraged ideals.
Certainly no nation was ever more peace-loving than
the American. To the boy of the Middle West the
fury of kings must have read like a fairy-tale.
The appeal to armed force was a method of compelling
righteousness which his entire training had taught
him to view with contempt as obsolete. Yet never
has any nation mobilised its resources more efficiently,
on so titanic a scale, in so brief a space of time
to re-establish justice with armed force. The
outraged ideal which achieved this miracle was the
denial by the Hun of the right of every man to personal
liberty and happiness.

Few people guessed that America would fling her weight
so utterly into the winning of the Allied cause.
Those who knew her best thought it scarcely possible.
Germany, who believed she knew her, thought it least
of all. German statesmen argued that America had
too much to lose by such a decision—­too
little to gain; the task of transporting men and materials
across three thousand miles of ocean seemed insuperable;
the differing traditions of her population would make
it impossible for her to concentrate her will in so
unusual a direction. Basing their arguments on
a knowledge of the deep-seated selfishness of human
nature, Hun statesmen were of the fixed opinion that
no amount of insult would compel America to take up
the sword.

Two and a half years before, those same statesmen
made the same mistake with regard to Great Britain
and her Dominions. The British were a race of
shop-keepers; no matter how chivalrous the call, nothing
would persuade them to jeopardise their money-bags.
If they did for once leap across their counters to
become Sir Galahads, then the Dominions would seize
that opportunity to secure their own base safety and
to fling the Mother Country out of doors. The
British gave these students of selfishness a surprise
from which their military machine has never recovered,
when the “Old Contemptibles” held up the
advance of the Hun legions and won for Europe a breathing-space.
The Dominions gave them a second lesson in magnanimity
when Canada’s lads built a wall with their bodies
to block the drive at Ypres. America refuted
them for the third time, when she proved her love of
world-liberty greater than her affection for the dollar,
bugling across the Atlantic her shrill challenge to
mailed bestiality. Germany has made the grave
mistake of estimating human nature at its lowest worth
as she sees it reflected in her own face. In every
case, in her judgment of the two great Anglo-Saxon
races, she has been at fault through over-emphasising
their capacity for baseness and under-estimating their
capacity to respond to an ideal. It was an ideal
that led the Pilgrim Fathers westward; after more than
two hundred years it is an ideal which pilots their
sons home again, racing through danger zones in their
steel-built greyhounds that they may lay down their
lives in France.

Page 10

In view of the monumental stupidity of her diplomacy
Germany has found it necessary to invent explanations.
The form these have taken as regards America has been
the attributing of fresh low motives. Her object
at first was to prove to the world at large how very
little difference America’s participation in
hostilities would make. When America tacitly
negatived this theory by the energy with which she
raised billions and mobilised her industries, Hun propagandists,
by an ingenious casuistry, spread abroad the opinion
that these mighty preparations were a colossal bluff
which would redound to Germany’s advantage.
They said that President Wilson had bided his time
so that his country might strut as a belligerent for
only the last six months, and so obtain a voice in
the peace negotiations. He did not intend that
America should fight, and was only getting his armies
ready that they might enforce peace when the Allies
were exhausted and already counting on Americans manning
their trenches. Inasmuch as his country would
neither have sacrificed nor died, he would be willing
to give Germany better terms; therefore America’s
apparent joining of the Allies was a camouflage which
would turn out an advantage to Germany. This
lie, with variations, has spread beyond the Rhine and
gained currency in certain of the neutral nations.

Four days after President Wilson’s declaration
of war the Canadians captured Vimy Ridge. As
the Hun prisoners came running like scared rabbits
through the shell-fire, we used to question them as
to conditions on their side of the line. Almost
the first question that was asked was, “What
do you think about the United States?” By far
the most frequent reply was, “We have submarines;
the United States will make no difference.”
The answer was so often in the same formula that it
was evident the men had been schooled in the opinion.
It was only the rare man of education who said, “It
is bad—­very bad; the worst mistake we have
made.”

We, in the front-line, were very far from appreciating
America’s decision at its full value. For
a year we had had the upper-hand of the Hun.
To use the language of the trenches, we knew that we
could go across No Man’s Land and “beat
him up” any time we liked. To tell the
truth, many of us felt a little jealous that when,
after two years of punishment, we had at last become
top-dog, we should be called upon to share the glory
of victory with soldiers of the eleventh hour.
We believed that we were entirely capable of finishing
the job without further aid. My own feeling,
as an Englishman living in New York, was merely one
of relief—­that now, when war was ended,
I should be able to return to friends of whom I need
not be ashamed. To what extent America’s
earnestness has changed that sentiment is shown by
the expressed desire of every Canadian, that if Americans
are anywhere on the Western Front, they ought to be
next to us in the line. “They are of our
blood,” we say; “they will carry on our
record.” Only those who have had the honour
to serve with the Canadian Corps and know its dogged
adhesion to heroic traditions, can estimate the value
of this compliment.

Page 11

I should say that in the eyes of the combatant, after
President Wilson, Mr. Ford has done more than any
other one man to interpret the spirit of his nation;
our altered attitude towards him typifies our altered
attitude towards America. Mr. Ford, the impassioned
pacifist, sailing to Europe in his ark of peace, staggered
our amazement. Mr. Ford, still the impassioned
pacifist, whose aeroplane engines will help to bomb
the Hun’s conscience into wakefulness, staggers
our amazement but commands our admiration. We
do not attempt to understand or reconcile his two
extremes of conduct, but as fighters we appreciate
the courage of soul that made him “about turn”
to search for his ideal in a painful direction when
the old friendly direction had failed. Here again
it is significant that both with regard to individuals
and nations, Germany’s sternest foes are war-haters—­war-haters
to such an extent that their principles at times have
almost shipwrecked their careers. In England our
example is Lloyd George. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon
world the slumbering spirit of Cromwell’s Ironsides
has sprung to life, reminding the British Empire and
the United States of their common ancestry. After
a hundred and forty years of drifting apart, we stand
side by side like our forefathers, the fighting pacifists
at Naseby; like them, having failed to make men good
with words, we will hew them into virtue with the
sword.

At the end of June I went back to Blighty wounded.
One of my most vivid recollections of the time that
followed is an early morning in July; it must have
been among the first of the days that I was allowed
out of hospital. London was green and leafy.
The tracks of the tramways shone like silver in the
sunlight. There was a spirit of release and immense
good humour abroad. My course followed the river
on the south side, all a-dance with wind and little
waves. As I crossed the bridge at Westminster
I became aware of an atmosphere of expectation.
Subconsciously I must have been noticing it for some
time. Along Whitehall the pavements were lined
with people, craning their necks, joking and jostling,
each trying to better his place. Trafalgar Square
was jammed with a dense mass of humanity, through
which mounted police pushed their way solemnly, like
beadles in a vast unroofed cathedral. Then for
the first time I noticed what I ought to have noticed
long before, that the Stars and Stripes were exceptionally
prevalent. Upon inquiry I was informed that this
was the day on which the first of the American troops
were to march. I picked up with a young officer
or the Dublin Fusiliers and together we forced our
way down Pall Mall to the office of The Cecil Rhodes
Oxford Scholars’ Foundation. From here
we could watch the line of march from Trafalgar Square
to Marlborough House. While we waited, I scanned
the group-photographs on the walls, some of which
contained portraits of German Rhodes Scholars with
whom I had been acquainted. I remembered how
they had always spent their vacations in England, assiduously
bicycling to the most unexpected places. In the
light of later developments I thought I knew the reason.

Page 12

Suddenly, far away bands struck up. We thronged
the windows, leaning out that we might miss nothing.
Through the half mile of people that stretched between
us and the music a shudder of excitement was running.
Then came cheers—­the deep-throated babel
of men’s voices and the shrill staccato of women’s.
“They’re coming,” some one cried;
then I saw them.

I forget which regiment lead. The Coldstreams
were there, the Scotch and Welsh Guards, the Irish
Guards with their saffron kilts and green ribbons
floating from their bag-pipes. A British regimental
band marched ahead of each American regiment to do
it honour. Down the sunlit canyon of Pall Mall
they swung to the tremendous cheering of the crowd.
Quite respectable citizens had climbed lamp-posts and
railings, and were waving their hats. I caught
the words that were being shouted, “Are we downhearted?”
Then, in a fierce roar of denial, “No!”
It was a wonderful ovation—­far more wonderful
than might have been expected from a people who had
grown accustomed to the sight of troops during the
last three years. The genuineness of the welcome
was patent; it was the voice of England that was thundering
along the pavements.

I was anxious to see the quality of the men which
America had sent. They drew near; then I saw
them plainly. They were fine strapping chaps,
broad of shoulder and proudly independent. They
were not soldiers yet; they were civilians who had
been rushed into khaki. Their equipment was of
every kind and sort and spoke eloquently of the hurry
in which they had been brought together. That
meant much to us in London-much more than if they
had paraded with all the “spit and polish”
of the crack troops who led them. It meant to
us that America was doing her bit at the earliest
date possible.

The other day, here in France, I met an officer of
one of those battalions; he told me the Americans’
side of the story. They were expert railroad
troops, picked out of civilian life and packed off
to England without any pretence at military training.
When they were informed that they were to be the leading
feature in a London procession, many of them even
lacked uniforms. With true American democracy
of spirit, the officers stripped their rank-badges
from their spare tunics and lent them to the privates,
who otherwise could not have marched.

“I’m satisfied,” my friend said,
“that there were Londoners so doggone hoarse
that night that they couldn’t so much as whisper.”

What impressed the men most of all was the King’s
friendly greeting of them at Buckingham Palace.
There were few of them who had ever seen a king before.
“Friendly—­that’s the word!
From the King downwards they were all so friendly.
It was more like a family party than a procession;
and on the return journey, when we marched at ease,
old ladies broke up our formations to kiss us.
Nice and grandmotherly of them we thought.”

Page 13

This, as I say, I learnt later in France; at the time
I only knew that the advance-guard of millions was
marching. As I watched them my eyes grew misty.
Troops who have already fought no longer stir me;
they have exchanged their dreams of glory for the reality
of sacrifice—­they know to what they may
look forward. But untried troops have yet to
be disillusioned; dreams of the pomp of war are still
in their eyes. They have not yet owned that they
are merely going out to die obscurely.

That day made history. It was then that England
first vividly realised that America was actually standing
shoulder to shoulder at her side. In making history
it obliterated almost a century and a half of misunderstanding.
I believe I am correct in saying that the last foreign
troops to march through London were the Hessians, who
fought against America in the Revolution, and that
never before had foreign volunteers marched through
England save as conquerors.

On my recovery I was sent home on sick leave and spent
a month in New York. No one who has not been
there since America joined the Allies can at all realise
the change that has taken place. It is a change
of soul, which no statistics of armaments can photograph.
America has come into the war not only with her factories,
her billions and her man-power, but with her heart
shining in her eyes. All her spread-eagleism
is gone. All her aggressive industrial ruthlessness
has vanished. With these has been lost her youthful
contempt for older civilisations, whom she was apt
to regard as decaying because they sent her emigrants.
She has exchanged her prejudices for admiration and
her grievances for kindness. Her “Hats off”
attitude to France, England, Belgium and to every
nation that has shed blood for the cause which now
is hers, was a thing which I had scarcely expected;
it was amazing. As an example of how this attitude
is being interpreted into action, school-histories
throughout the United States are being re-written,
so that American children of the future may be trained
in friendship for Great Britain, whereas formerly
stress was laid on the hostilities of the eighteenth
century which produced the separation. As a further
example, many American boys, who for various reasons
were not accepted by the military authorities in their
own country, have gone up to Canada to join.

One such case is typical. Directly it became
evident that America was going into the war, one boy,
with whom I am acquainted, made up his mind to be
prepared to join. He persuaded his father to allow
him to go to a Flying School to train as a pilot.
Having obtained his certificate, he presented himself
for enlistment and was turned down on the ground that
he was lacking in a sense of equipoise. Being
too young for any other branch of the service, he
persuaded his family to allow him to try his luck
in Canada. Somehow, by hook or by crook, he had
to get into the war. The Royal Flying Corps accepted

Page 14

him with the proviso that he must take out his British
naturalisation papers. This changing of nationality
was a most bitter pill for his family to swallow.
The boy had done his best to be a soldier; he was the
eldest son, and there they would willingly have had
the matter rest. Moreover they could compel the
matter to rest there, for, being under age, he could
not change his nationality without his father’s
consent. It was his last desperate argument that
turned the decision in his favour, “If it’s
a choice between my honour and my country, I choose
my honour every time.” So now he’s
a Britisher, learning “spit and polish”
and expecting to bring down a Hun almost any day.

One noticed in almost the smallest details how deeply
America had committed her conscience to her new undertaking.
While in England we grumble about a food-control which
is absolutely necessary to our preservation, America
is voluntarily restricting herself not for her own
sake, but for the sake of the Allies. They say
that they are being “Hooverized,” thus
coining a new word out of Mr. Hoover’s name.
Sometimes these Hooverish practices produce contrasts
which are rather quaint. I went to stay with
a friend who had just completed as his home an exact
reproduction of a palace in Florence. Whoever
went short, there was little that he could not afford.
At our meals I noticed that I was the only person
who was served with butter and sugar, and enquired
why. “It’s all right for you,”
I was told; “you’re a soldier; but if
we eat butter and sugar, some of the Allies who really
need them will have to go short.” A small
illustration, but one that is typical of a national,
sacrificial, underlying thought.

Later I met with many instances of the various forms
in which this thought is taking shape. I was
in America when the Liberty War Loan was so amazingly
over-subscribed. I saw buses, their roofs crowded
with bands and orators, doing the tour of street-corners.
Every store of any size, every railroad, every bank
and financial corporation had set for its employes
and customers the ideal sum which it considered that
they personally ought to subscribe. This ideal
sum was recorded on the face of a clock, hung outside
the building. As the gross amount actually collected
increased, the hands were seen to revolve. Everything
that eloquence and ingenuity could devise was done
to gather funds for the war. Big advertisers
made a gift of their newspaper space to the nation.
There were certain public-spirited men who took up
blocks of war-bonds, making the request that no interest
should be paid. You went to a theatre; during
the interval actors and actresses sold war-certificates,
harangued the audience and set the example by their
own purchases.

When the Liberty War Loan had been raised, the Red
Cross started its great national drive, apportioning
the necessary grand total among all the cities from
sea-board to sea-board, according to their wealth and
population.

Page 15

One heard endless stories of the variety of efforts
being made. America had committed her heart to
the Allies with an abandon which it is difficult to
describe. Young society girls, who had been brought
up in luxury and protected from ugliness all their
lives, were banding themselves into units, supplying
the money, hiring the experts, and coming over themselves
to France to look after refugees’ babies.
Others were planning to do reconstruction work in the
devastated districts immediately behind the battle-line.
I met a number of these enthusiasts before they sailed;
I have since seen them at work in France. What
struck me at the time was their rose-leaf frailness
and utter unsuitability for the task. I could
guess the romantic visions which tinted their souls
to the colour of sacrifice; I also knew what refugees
and devastated districts look like. I feared that
the discrepancy between the dream and the reality
would doom them to disillusion.

During the month that I was in America I visited several
of the camps. The first draft army had been called.
The first call gave the country seven million men
from which to select. I was surprised to find
that in many camps, before military training could
commence, schools in English had to be started to
ensure the men’s proper understanding of commands.
This threw a new light on the difficulties Mr. Wilson
had had to face in coming into the war.

The men of the draft army represent as many nationalities,
dialects and race-prejudices as there are in Europe.
They are a Europe expatriated. During their residence
in America a great many of them have lived in communities
where their own language is spoken, and their own
customs are maintained. Frequently they have their
own newspapers, which foster their national exclusiveness,
and reflect the hatreds and affections of the country
from which they emigrated. These conditions set
up a barrier between them and current American opinion
which it was difficult for the authorities at Washington
to cross. The people who represented neutral
European nations naturally were anxious for the neutrality
of America. The people who represented the Central
Powers naturally were against America siding with the
Allies. The only way of re-directing their sympathies
was by means of education and propaganda; this took
time, especially when they were separated from the
truth by the stumbling block of language. For
three years they had to be persuaded that they were
no longer Poles, Swedes, Germans, Finns, Norwegians,
but first and last Americans. I mention this here,
in connection with the teaching of the draft army English,
because it affords one of the most vivid and comprehensible
reasons for America’s long delay.

What brought America into the war? I have often
been asked the question; in answering it I always
feel that I am giving only a partial answer.
On the one hand there is the record of her two and
a half years of procrastination, on the other the
titanic upspringing of her warrior-spirit, which happened
almost in a day. How can one reconcile the multitudinous
pacific notes which issued from Washington with the
bugle-song to which the American boys march: “We’ve
got four years to do this job.” The cleavage
between the two attitudes is too sharp for the comprehension
of other nations.

Page 16

The first answer which I shall give is entirely sane
and will be accepted by the rankest cynic. America
came into the war at the moment she realised that
her own national life was endangered. Her leaders
realised this months before her masses could be persuaded.
The political machinery of the United States is such
that no Government would dare to commence hostilities
unless it was assured that its decision was the decision
of the entire nation. That the Government might
have this assurance, Mr. Wilson had to maintain peace
long after the intellect of America had declared for
war, while he educated the cosmopolitan citizenship
of his country into a knowledge of Hun designs.
The result was that he created the appearance of having
been pushed into hostilities by the weight of public
opinion.

For many months the Secret Service agents of the States,
aided by the agents of other nations, were unravelling
German plots and collecting data of treachery so irrefutable
that it had to be accepted. When all was ready
the first chapters of the story were divulged.
They were divulged almost in the form of a serial
novel, so that the man who read his paper to-day and
said, “No doubt that isolated item is true,
but it doesn’t incriminate the entire German
nation,” next day on opening his paper, found
further proof and was forced to retreat to more ingenious
excuses. One day he was informed of Germany’s
abuse of neutral embassies and mail-bags; the next
of the submarine bases in Mexico, prepared as a threat
against American shipping; the day after that the
whole infamous story of how Berlin had financed the
Mexican Revolution. Germany’s efforts to
provoke an American-Japanese war leaked out, her attempts
to spread disloyalty among German-Americans, her conspiracies
for setting fire to factories and powder-plants, including
the blowing up of bridges and the Welland Canal.
Quietly, circumstantially, without rancour, the details
were published of the criminal spider-web woven by
the Dernburgs, Bernstorffs and Von Papens, accredited
creatures of the Kaiser, who with Machiavellian smiles
had professed friendship for those whom their hands
itched to slay and strangle. Gradually the camouflage
of bovine geniality was lifted from the face of Germany
and the dripping fangs of the Blonde Beast were displayed—­the
Minotaur countenance of one glutted with human flesh,
weary with rape and rapine, but still tragically insatiable
and lusting for the new sensation of hounding America
to destruction.

I have not placed these revelations in their proper
sequence; some were made after war had been declared.
They had the effect of changing every decent American
into a self-appointed detective. The weight of
evidence put Germany’s perfidy beyond dispute;
clues to new and endless chains of machinations were
discovered daily. The Hun had come as a guest
into America’s house with only one intent—­to
do murder as soon as the lights were out.

Page 17

The anger which these disclosures produced knew no
bounds. Hun apologists—­the type of
men who invariably believe that there is a good deal
to be said on both sides—­quickly faded into
patriots. There had been those who had cried
out for America’s intervention from the first
day that Belgium’s neutrality had been violated.
Many of these, losing patience, had either enlisted
in Canada or were already in France on some errand
of mercy. Their cry had reached Washington at
first only as a whisper, very faint and distant.
Little by little that cry had swelled, till it became
the nation’s voice, angry, insistent, not to
be disregarded. The most convinced humanitarian,
together with the sincerest admirer of the old-fashioned
kindly Hans, had to join in that cry or brand himself
a traitor by his silence.

America came into the war, as every country came,
because her life was threatened. She is not fighting
for France, Great Britain, Belgium, Serbia; she is
fighting to save herself. I am glad to make this
point because I have heard camouflaged Pro-Germans
and thoughtless mischief-makers discriminating between
the Allies. “We are not fighting for Great
Britain,” they say, “but for plucky France.”
When I was in New York last October a firm stand was
being made against these discriminators; some of them
even found themselves in the hands of the Secret Service
men. The feeling was growing that not to be Pro-British
was not to be Pro-Ally, and that not to be Pro-Ally
was to be anti-American. This talk of fighting
for somebody else is all lofty twaddle. America
is fighting for America. While the statement is
perfectly true, Americans have a right to resent it.

In September, 1914, I crossed to Holland and was immensely
disgusted at the interpretation of Great Britain’s
action which I found current there. I had supposed
that Holland would be full of admiration; I found
that she was nothing of the sort. We Britishers,
in those early days, believed that we were magnanimous
big brothers who could have kept out of the bloodshed,
but preferred to die rather than see the smaller nations
bullied. Men certainly did not join Kitchener’s
mob because they believed that England’s life
was threatened. I don’t believe that any
strong emotion of patriotism animated Canada in her
early efforts. The individual Briton donned the
khaki because he was determined to see fair play,
and was damned if he would stand by a spectator while
women and children were being butchered in Belgium.
He felt that he had to do something to stop it.
If he didn’t, the same thing would happen in
Holland, then in Denmark, then in Norway. There
was no end to it. When a mad dog starts running
the best thing to do is to shoot it.

But the Hollanders didn’t agree with me at all.
“You’re fighting for yourselves,”
they said. “You’re not fighting to
save us from being invaded; you’re not fighting
to prevent the Hun from conquering France; you’re
not fighting to liberate Belgium. You’re
fighting because you know that if you let France be
crushed, it will be your turn next.”

Page 18

Quite true—­and absolutely unjust.
The Hollander, whose households we were guarding,
chose to interpret our motive at its most ignoble
worth. Our men were receiving in their bodies
the wounds which would have been inflicted on Holland,
had we elected to stand out. In the light of
subsequent events, all the world acknowledges that
we were and are fighting for our own households; but
it is a glorious certainty that scarcely a Britisher
who died in those early days had the least realisation
of the fact. It was the chivalrous vision of
a generous Crusade that led our chaps from their firesides
to the trampled horror that is Flanders. They
said farewell to their habitual affections, and went
out singing to their marriage with death.

I suppose there has been no war that could not be
interpreted ultimately as a war of self-interest.
The statesmen who make wars always carefully reckon
the probabilities of loss or gain; but the lads who
kiss their sweethearts good-bye require reasons more
vital than those of pounds, shillings and pence.
Few men lay down their lives from self-interested
motives. Courage is a spiritual quality which
requires a spiritual inducement. Men do not set
a price on their chance of being blown to bits by
shells. Even patriotism is too vague to be a
sufficient incentive. The justice of the cause
to be fought for helps; it must be proportionate to
the magnitude of the sacrifice demanded. But
always an ideal is necessary—­an ideal of
liberty, indignation and mercy. If this is true
of the men who go out to die, it is even more true
of the women who send them,

“Where there’re no children
left to pull
The few scared, ragged flowers—­
All that was ours, and, God, how beautiful!
All, all that was once ours,
Lies faceless, mouthless, mire to mire,
So lost to all sweet semblance of desire
That we, in those fields seeking desperately
One face long-lost to love, one face that
lies
Only upon the breast of Memory,
Would never find it—­even the
very blood
Is stamped into the horror of the mud—­
Something that mad men trample under-foot
In the narrow trench—­for these
things are not men—­
Things shapeless, sodden, mute
Beneath the monstrous limber of the guns;
Those things that loved us once...
Those that were ours, but never ours again.”

For two and a half years the American press specialized
on the terror aspect of the European hell. Every
sensational, exceptional fact was not only chronicled,
but widely circulated. The bodily and mental
havoc that can be wrought by shell fire was exaggerated
out of all proportion to reality. Photographs,
almost criminal in type, were published to illustrate
the brutal expression of men who had taken part in
bayonet charges. Lies were spread broadcast by
supposedly reputable persons, stating how soldiers
had to be maddened with drugs or alcohol before they
would go over the top. Much of what was recorded

Page 19

was calculated to stagger the imagination and intimidate
the heart. The reason for this was that the supposed
eye-witnesses rarely saw what they recorded.
They had usually never been within ten miles of the
front, for only combatants are allowed in the line.
They brought civilian minds, undisciplined to the
conquest of fear, to their task; they never for one
instant guessed the truly spiritual exaltation which
gives wings to the soul of the man who fights in a
just cause. Squalor, depravity, brutalisation,
death—­moral, mental and physical deformity
were the rewards which the American public learned
the fighting man gained in the trenches. They
heard very little of the capacity for heroism, the
eagerness for sacrifice, the gallant self-effacement
which having honor for a companion taught. And
yet, despite this frantic portrayal of terror, America
decided for war. Her National Guard and Volunteers
rolled up in millions, clamouring to cross the three
thousand miles of water that they might place their
lives in jeopardy. They were no more urged by
motives of self-interest than were the men who enlisted
in Kitchener’s mob. It wasn’t the
threat to their national security that brought them;
it was the lure of an ideal—­the fine white
knightliness of men whose compassion had been tormented
and whose manhood had been challenged. When one
says that America came into the war to save herself
it is only true of her statesmen; it is no more true
of her masses than it was true of the masses of Great
Britain.

So far, in my explanation as to why America came into
the war, I have been scarcely more generous in the
attributing of magnanimous motives than my Hollander.
To all intents and purposes I have said, “America
is fighting because she knows that if the Allies are
over-weakened or crushed, it will be her turn next.”
In discussing the matter with me, one of our Generals
said, “I really don’t see that it matters
a tuppenny cuss why she’s fighting, so long
as she helps us to lick the Hun and does it quickly.”
But it does matter. The reasons for her having
taken up arms make all the difference to our respect
for her. Here, then, are the reasons which I
attribute: enthusiasm for the ideals of the Allies;
admiration for the persistency of their heroism; compassionate
determination to borrow some of the wounds which otherwise
would be inflicted upon nations which have already
suffered. A small band of pioneers in mercy are
directly responsible for this change of attitude in
two and a half years from opportunistic neutrality
to a reckless welcoming of martyrdom.

At the opening of hostilities in 1914, America divided
herself into two camps—­the Pro-Allies and
the others. “The others” consisted
of people of all shades of opinion and conviction:
the anti-British, anti-French, the pro-German, the
anti-war and the merely neutral, some of whom set
feverishly to work to make a tradesman’s advantage
out of Europe’s misfortune. A great traffic
sprang up in the manufacture of war materials.
Almost all of these went to the Allies, owing to the
fact that Britain controlled the seas. Whether
they would not have been sold just as readily to Germany,
had that been possible, is a matter open to question.
In any case, the camp of “The Others” was
overwhelmingly in the majority.

Page 20

One by one, and in little protesting bands, the friends
of the Allies slipped overseas bound on self-imposed,
sacrificial quests. They went like knight-errants
to the rescue; while others suffered, their own ease
was intolerable. The women, whom they left, formed
themselves into groups for the manufacture of the
munitions of mercy. There were men like Alan
Seeger, who chanced to be in Europe when war broke
out; many of these joined up with the nearest fighting
units. “I have a rendezvous with death,”
were Alan Seeger’s last words as he fell mortally
wounded between the French and German trenches.
His voice was the voice of thousands who had pledged
themselves to keep that rendezvous in the company
of Britishers, Belgians and Frenchmen, long before
their country had dreamt of committing herself.
Some of these friends of the Allies chose the Ford
Ambulance, others positions in the Commission for
the Relief of Belgium, and yet others the more forceful
sympathy of the bayonet as a means of expressing their
wrath. Soon, through the heart of France, with
the tricolor and the Stars and Stripes flying at either
end, “le train Americaine” was seen hurrying,
carrying its scarlet burden. This sight could
hardly be called neutral unless a similar sight could
be seen in Germany. It could not. The Commission
for the Relief of Belgium was actually anything but
neutral; to minister to the results of brutality is
tacitly to condemn.

At Neuilly-sur-Seine the American Ambulance Hospital
sprang up. It undertook the most grievous cases,
making a specialty of facial mutilations. American
girls performed the nursing of these pitiful human
wrecks. Increasingly the crusader spirit was finding
a gallant response in the hearts of America’s
girlhood. By the time that President Wilson flung
his challenge, eighty-six war relief organizations
were operating in France. In very many cases these
organizations only represented a hundredth part of
the actual personnel working; the other ninety-nine
hundredths were in the States, rolling bandages, shredding
oakum, slitting linen, making dressings. Long
before April, 1917, American college boys had won a
name by their devotion in forcing their ambulances
over shell torn roads on every part of the French
Front, but, perhaps, with peculiar heroism at Verdun.
Already the American Flying Squadron has earned a
veteran’s reputation for its daring. The
report of the sacrificial courage of these pioneers
had travelled to every State in the Union; their example
had stirred, shamed and educated the nation. It
is to these knight-errants—­very many of
them boys and girls in years—­to the Mrs.
Whartons, the Alan Seegers, the Hoovers and the Thaws
that I attribute America’s eager acceptance
of Calvary, when at last it was offered to her by
her Statesmen. From an anguished horror to be
repelled, war had become a spiritual Eldorado in whose
heart lay hidden the treasure-trove of national honor.

The individual American soldier is inspired by just
as altruistic motives as his brother-Britisher.
Compassion, indignation, love of justice, the determination
to see right conquer are his incentives. You
can make a man a conscript, drill him, dress him in
uniform, but you cannot force him to face up to four
years to do his job unless the ideals were there beforehand.
I have seen American troop-ships come into the dock
with ten thousand men singing,

Page 21

“Good-bye, Liza,
I’m going to smash the Kaiser.”

I have been present when packed audiences have gone
mad in reiterating the American equivalent for Tipperary,
with its brave promise,

“We’ll be over,
We’re coming over,
And we won’t be back till it’s
over, over there.”

But nothing I have heard so well expresses the cold
anger of the American fighting-man as these words
which they chant to their bugle-march, “We’ve
got four years to do this job.”

II

WAR AS A JOB

I have been so fortunate as to be able to watch three
separate nations facing up to the splendour of Armageddon—­England,
France, America. The spirit of each was different.
I arrived in England from abroad the week after war
had been declared. There was a new vitality in
the air, a suppressed excitement, a spirit of youth
and—­it sounds ridiculous—­of
opportunity. The England I had left had been wont
to go about with a puckered forehead; she was a victim
of self-disparagement. She was like a mother
who had borne too many children and was at her wits’
end to know how to feed or manage them. They
were getting beyond her control. Since the Boer
War there had been a growing tendency in the Press
to under-rate all English effort and to over-praise
to England’s discredit the superior pushfulness
of other nations. This melancholy nagging which
had for its constant text, “Wake up, John Bull,”
had produced the hallucination that there was something
vitally the matter with the Mother Country. No
one seemed to have diagnosed her complaint, but those
of us who grew weary of being told that we were behind
the times, took prolonged trips to more cheery quarters
of the globe. It is the Englishman’s privilege
to run himself down; he usually does it with his tongue
in his cheek. But for the ten years preceding
the outbreak of hostilities, the prophets of Fleet
Street certainly carried their privilege beyond a joke.
Pessimism was no longer an amusing pose; it was becoming
a habit.

One week of the iron tonic of war had changed all
that. The atmosphere was as different as the
lowlands from the Alps; it was an atmosphere of devil-may-care
assurance and adventurous manhood. Every one had
the summer look of a boat-race crowd when the Leander
is to be pulled off at Henley. In comparing the
new England with the old, I should have said that
every one now had the comfortable certainty that he
was wanted—­that he had a future and something
to live for. But it wasn’t the something
to live for that accounted for this gay alertness;
it was the sure foreknowledge of each least important
man that he had something worth dying for at last.

A strange and magnificent way of answering misfortune’s
challenge—­an Elizabethan way, the knack
of which we believed we had lost! “Business
as usual” was written across our doorways.
It sounded callous and unheeding, but at night the
lads who had written it there, tiptoed out and stole
across the Channel, scarcely whispering for fear they
should break our hearts by their going.

Page 22

Death may be regarded as a funeral or as a Columbus
expedition to worlds unknown—­it may be
seized upon as an opportunity for weeping or for a
display of courage. From the first day in her
choice England never hesitated; like a boy set free
from school, she dashed out to meet her danger with
laughter. Her high spirits have never failed her.
Her cavalry charge with hunting-calls upon their lips.
Her Tommies go over the top humming music-hall ditties.
The Hun is still “jolly old Fritz.”
The slaughter is still “a nice little war.”
Death is still “the early door.”
The mud-soaked “old Bills” of the trenches,
cheerfully ignoring vermin, rain and shell fire, continue
to wind up their epistles with, “Hoping this
finds you in the pink, as it leaves me at present.”
They are always in the pink for epistolary purposes,
whatever the strafing or the weather. That’s
England; at all costs, she has to be a sportsman.
I wonder she doesn’t write on the crosses above
her dead, “Yours in the pink:a British
soldier, killed in action.” England
is in the pink for the duration of the war.

The Frenchman cannot understand us, and I don’t
blame him. Our high spirits impress him as untimely
and indecent. War for him is not a sport.
How could it be, with his homesteads ravaged, his cities
flattened, his women violated, his populations prisoners
in occupied territories? For him war is a martyrdom
which he embraces with a fierce gladness. His
spirit is well illustrated by an incident that happened
the other day in Paris. A descendant of Racine,
a well-known figure at the opera, was travelling in
the Metro when he spotted a poilu with a string of
ten medals on his breast. The old aristocrat
went over to the soldier and apologised for speaking
to him. “But,” he said, “I
have never seen any poilu with so many decorations.
You must be of the very bravest.”

“That is nothing,” the man replied sombrely;
“before they kill me I shall have won many more.
This I earned in revenge for my wife, who was brutally
murdered. And this and this and this for my daughters
who were ravished. And these others—­they
are for my sons who are now no more.”

“My friend, if you will let me, I should like
to embrace you.” And there, in the sight
of all the passengers, the old habitue of the opera
and the common soldier kissed each other. The
one satisfaction that the French blind have is in
counting the number of Boche they have slaughtered.
“In that raid ten of us killed fifty,”
one will say; “the memory makes me very happy.”

Curiously enough the outrage that makes the Frenchman
most revengeful is not the murder of his family or
the defilement of his women, but the wilful killing
of his land and orchards. The land gave birth
to all his flesh and blood; when his farm is laid
waste wilfully, it is as though the mother of all
his generations was violated. This accounts for
the indomitable way in which the peasants insist on
staying on in their houses under shell-fire, refusing
to depart till they are forcibly turned out.

Page 23

We in England, still less in America, have never approached
the loathing which is felt for the Boche in France.
Men spit as they utter his name, as though the very
word was foul in the mouth.

In the face of all that they have suffered, I do not
wonder that the French misunderstand the easy good-humour
with which we English go out to die. In their
eyes and with the continual throbbing of their wounds,
this war is an occasion for neither good-humour nor
sportsmanship, but for the wrath of a Hebrew Jehovah,
which only blows can appease or make articulate.
If every weapon were taken from their hands and all
their young men were dead, with naked fists those who
were left would smite—­smite and smite.
It is fitting that they should feel this way, seeing
themselves as they do perpetually frescoed against
the sky-line of sacrifice; but I am glad that our English
boys can laugh while they die.

In trying to explain the change I found in England
after war had commenced, I mentioned Henley and the
boat-race crowds. I don’t think it was
a change; it was only a bringing to the surface of
something that had been there always. Some years
ago I was at Henley when the Belgians carried off
the Leander Cup from the most crack crew that England
could bring together. Evening after evening through
the Regatta week the fear had been growing that we
should lose, yet none of that fear was reflected in
our attitude towards our Belgian guests. Each
evening as they came up the last stretch of river,
leading by lengths and knocking another contestant
out, the spectators cheered them madly. Their
method of rowing smashed all our traditions; it wasn’t
correct form; it wasn’t anything. It ought
to have made one angry. But these chaps were
game; they were winning. “Let’s play
fair,” said the river; so they cheered them.
On the last night when they beat Leander, looking
fresh as paint, leading by a length and taking the
championship out of England, you would never have guessed
by the flicker of an eyelash that it wasn’t the
most happy conclusion of a good week’s sport
for every oarsman present.

It’s the same spirit essentially that England
is showing to-day. She cheers the winner.
She trusts in her strength for another day. She
insists on playing fair. She considers it bad
manners to lose one’s temper. She despises
to hate back. She has carried this spirit so far
that if you enter the college chapels of Oxford to-day,
you will find inscribed on memorial tablets to the
fallen not only the names of Britishers, but also
the names of German Rhodes Scholars, who died fighting
for their country against the men who were once their
friends. Generosity, justice, disdain of animosity-these
virtues were learnt on the playing-fields and race-courses.
England knows their value; she treats war as a sport
because so she will fight better. For her that
approach to adversity is normal.

Page 24

With us war is a sport. With the French it is
a martyrdom. But with the Americans it is a job.
“We’ve got four years to do this job.
We’ve got four years to do this job,”
as the American soldiers chant. I think in these
three attitudes towards war as a martyrdom, as sport
and as a job, you get reflected the three gradations
of distance by which each nation is divided from the
trenches. France had her tribulation thrust upon
her. She was attacked; she had no option.
England, separated by the Channel, could have restrained
the weight of her strength, biding her time.
She had her moment of choice, but rushed to the rescue
the moment the first Hun bayonet gleamed across the
Belgian threshold. America, fortified by the Atlantic,
could not believe that her peace was in any way assailed.
The idea seemed too madly far-fetched. At first
she refused to realise that this apportioning of a
continent three thousand miles distant from Germany
was anything but a pipe-dream of diplomats in their
dotage. It was inconceivable that it could be
the practical and achievable cunning of military bullies
and strategists. The truth dawned too slowly for
her to display any vivid burst of anger. “It
isn’t true,” she said. And then,
“It seems incredible.” And lastly,
“What infernal impertinence!”

It was the infernal impertinence of Germany’s
schemes for transatlantic plunder that roused the
average American. It awoke in him a terrible,
calm anger—­a feeling that some one must
be punished. It was as though he broke off suddenly
in what he was doing and commenced rolling up his
shirt-sleeves. There was a grim, surprised determination
about his quietness, which had not been seen in any
other belligerent nation. France became consciously
and tragically heroic when war commenced. England
became unwontedly cheerful because life was moving
on grander levels. In America there was no outward
change. The old habit of feverish industry still
persisted, but was intensified and applied in unselfish
directions.

What has impressed me most in my tour of the American
activities in France is the businesslike relentlessness
of the preparations. Everything is being done
on a titanic scale and everything is being done to
last. The ports, the railroads, the plants that
are being constructed will still be standing a hundred
years from now. There’s no “Home
for Christmas” optimism about America’s
method of making war. One would think she was
expecting to be still fighting when all the present
generation is dead. She is investing billions
of dollars in what can only be regarded as permanent
improvements. The handsomeness of her spirit
is illustrated by the fact that she has no understanding
with the French for reimbursement.

Page 25

In sharp contrast with this handsomeness of spirit
is the iciness of her purpose as regards the Boche.
I heard no hatred of the individual German—­only
the deep conviction that Prussianism must be crushed
at all costs. The American does not speak of
“Poor old Fritz” as we do on our British
Front. He’s too logical to be sorry for
his enemy. His attitude is too sternly impersonal
for him to be moved by any emotions, whether of detestation
or charity, as regards the Hun. All he knows
is that a Frankenstein machinery has been set in motion
for the destruction of the world; to counteract it
he is creating another piece of machinery. He
has set about his job in just the same spirit that
he set about overcoming the difficulties of the Panama
Canal. He has been used to overcoming the obstinacies
of Nature; the human obstinacies of his new task intrigue
him. I believe that, just as in peace times big
business was his romance and the wealth which he gained
from it was often incidental, so in France the job
as a job impels him, quite apart from its heroic object.
After all, smashing the Pan-Germanic Combine is only
another form of trust-busting—­trust-busting
with aeroplanes and guns instead of with law and ledgers.

There is something almost terrifying to me about this
quiet collectedness—­this Pierpont Morgan
touch of sphinxlike aloofness from either malice or
mercy. Just as America once said, “Business
is business” and formed her world-combines, collaring
monopolies and allowing the individual to survive
only by virtue of belonging to the fittest, so now
she is saying, “War is war”—­something
to be accomplished with as little regard to landscapes
as blasting a railroad across a continent.

For the first time in the history of this war Germany
is “up against” a nation which is going
to fight her in her own spirit, borrowing her own
methods. This statement needs explaining; its
truth was first brought to my attention at American
General Headquarters. The French attitude towards
the war is utterly personal; it is bayonet to bayonet.
It depends on the unflinching courage of every individual
French man and woman. The English attitude is
that of the knight-errant, seeking high adventures
and welcoming death in a noble cause. But the
German attitude disregards the individual and knows
nothing of gallantry. It lacks utterly the spiritual
elation which made the strength of the French at Verdun
and of the English at Mons. The German attitude
is that of a soulless organisation, invented for one
purpose—­profitable conquest. War for
the Hun is not a final and dreaded atonement for the
restoring of justice to the world; it is a business
undertaking which, as he is fond of telling us, has
never failed to yield him good interest on his capital.
I have seen a good deal of the capital he has invested
in the battlefields he has lost—­men smashed
to pulp, bruised by shells out of resemblance to anything
human, the breeding place of flies and pestilence,
no longer the homes of loyalties and affections.
I cannot conceive what percentage of returns can be
said to compensate for the agony expended on such
indecent Golgothas. However, the Hun has assured
us that it pays him; he flatters himself that he is
a first-class business man.

Page 26

But so does the American, and he knows the game from
more points of view. For years he has patterned
his schools and colleges on German educational methods.
What applies to his civilian centres of learning applies
to his military as well. German text-books gave
the basis for all American military thought.
American officers have been trained in German strategy
just as thoroughly as if they had lived in Potsdam.
At the start of the war many of them were in the field
with the German armies as observers. They are
able to synchronise their thoughts with the thoughts
of their German enemies and at the same time to take
advantage of all that the Allies can teach them.

“War is a business,” the Germans have
said. The Americans, with an ideal shining in
their eyes, have replied, “Very well. We
didn’t want to fight you; but now that you have
forced us, we will fight you on your own terms.
We will make war on you as a business, for we are
businessmen. We will crush you coldly, dispassionately,
without rancour, without mercy till we have proved
to you that war is not profitable business, but hell.”

The American, as I have met him in France, has not
changed one iota from the man that he was in New York
or Chicago. He has transplanted himself untheatrically
to the scenes of battlefields and set himself undisturbedly
to the task of dying. There is an amazing normality
about him. You find him in towns, ancient with
chateaux and wonderful with age; he is absolutely
himself, keenly efficient and irreverently modern.
Everywhere, from the Bay of Biscay to the Swiss border,
from the Mediterranean to the English Channel, you
see the lean figure and the slouch hat of the U.S.A.
soldier. He is invariably well-conducted, almost
always alone and usually gravely absorbed in himself.
The excessive gravity of the American in khaki has
astonished the men of the other armies who feel that,
life being uncertain, it is well to make as genial
a use of it as possible while it lasts. The soldier
from the U.S.A. seems to stand always restless, alert,
alone, listening—­waiting for the call to
come. He doesn’t sink into the landscape
the way other troops have done. His impatience
picks him out—­the impatience of a man in
France solely for one purpose. I have seen him
thus a thousand times, standing at street-corners,
in the crowd but not of it, remarkable to every one
but himself. Every man and officer I have spoken
to has just one thing to say about what is happening
inside him, “Let them take off my khaki and send
me back to America, or else hurry me into the trenches.
I came here to get started on this job; the waiting
makes me tired.”

“Let me get into the trenches,” that was
the cry of the American soldier that I heard on every
hand. Having witnessed his eagerness, cleanness
and intensity, I ask no more questions as to how he
will acquit himself.

Page 27

I have presented him as an extremely practical person,
but no American that I ever met was solely practical.
If you watch him closely you will always find that
he is doing practical things for an idealistic end.
The American who accumulates a fortune to himself,
whether it be through corralling railroads, controlling
industries, developing mines or establishing a chain
of dry-goods stores, doesn’t do it for the money
only, but because he finds in business the poetry of
creating, manipulating, evolving—­the exhilaration
and adventure of swaying power. And so there
came a day when I caught my American soldier dreaming
and off his guard.

All day I had been motoring through high uplands.
It was a part of France with which I was totally unfamiliar.
A thin mist was drifting across the country, getting
lost in valleys where it piled up into fleecy mounds,
getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like
tattered banners. Every now and then, with the
suddenness of our approach, we would startle an aged
shepherd, muffled and pensive as an Arab, strolling
slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the sentinel
goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely
mystic. Time seemed a mood. I had ceased
to trouble about where I was going; that I knew my
ultimate destination was sufficient. The way that
led to it, which I had never seen before, should never
see again perhaps, and through which I travelled at
the rate of an express, seemed a fairy non-existent
Hollow Land. Landscapes grew blurred with the
speed of our passage. They loomed up on us like
waves, stayed with us for a second and vanished.
The staff-officer, who was my conductor, drowsed on
his seat beside the driver. He had wearied himself
in the morning, taking me now here to see an American
Division putting on a manoeuvre, now there to where
the artillery were practising, then to another valley
where machine-guns tapped like thousands of busy typewriters
working on death’s manuscript. After that
had come bayonet charges against dummies, rifle-ranges
and trench-digging—­all the industrious
pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding
actuality. We were far away from all that now;
the brown figures had melted into the brownness of
the hills. There might have been no war.
Perhaps there wasn’t. Never was there a
world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy.
My head nodded. I opened my eyes, pulled myself
together and again nodded. The roar of the engine
was soothing. The rush of wind lay heavy against
my eye-lids. It seemed odd that I should be here
and not in the trenches. When I was in the line
I had often made up life’s deficiencies by imagining,
imagining.... Perhaps I was really in the line
now. I wouldn’t wake up to find out.
That would come presently—­it always had.

Page 28

We were slowing down. I opened my eyes lazily.
No, we weren’t stopping—­only going
through a village. What a quaint grey village
it was—­worth looking at if I wasn’t
so tired. I was on the point of drowsing off
again when I caught sight of a word written on a sign-board,
Domremy. My brain cleared. I sat up
with a jerk. It was magic that I should find
myself here without warning—­at Domremy,
the Bethlehem of warrior-woman’s mercy.
I had dreamed from boyhood of this place as a legend—­a
memory of white chivalry to be found on no map, a
record of beauty as utterly submerged as the lost land
of Lyonesse. Hauntingly the words came back,
“Who is this that cometh from Domremy?
Who is she in bloody coronation robes from Rheims?
Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walking
in the furnaces of Rouen? This is she, the shepherd
girl....” All about me on the little hills
were the woodlands through which she must have led
her sheep and wandered with her heavenly visions.

We had come to a bend in the village street.
Where the road took a turn stood an aged church; nestling
beside it in a little garden was a grey, semi-fortified
mediaeval dwelling. The garden was surrounded
by high spiked railings, planted on a low stone wall.
Sitting on the wall beside the entrance was an American
soldier. He had a small French child on either
knee—­one arm about each of them; thus embarrassed
he was doing his patient best to roll a Bull Durham
cigarette. The children were vividly interested;
they laughed up into the soldier’s face.
One of them was a boy, the other a girl. The long
golden curls of the girl brushed against the soldier’s
cheek. The three heads bent together, almost
touching. The scene was timelessly human, despite
the modernity of the khaki. Joan of Arc might
have been that little girl.

I stopped the driver, got out and approached the group.
The soldier jumped to attention and saluted.
In answer to my question, he said, “Yes, this
is where she lived. That’s her house—­that
grey cottage with scarcely any windows. Bastien
le Page could never have seen it; it isn’t a
bit like his picture in the Metropolitan Gallery.”

He spoke in a curiously intimate way as if he had
known Joan of Arc and had spoken with her there—­as
if she had only just departed. It was odd to
reflect that America had still lain hidden behind the
Atlantic when Joan walked the world.

We entered the gate into the garden, the American
soldier, the children and I together. The little
girl, with that wistful confidence that all French
children show for men in khaki, slipped her grubby
little paw into my hand. I expect Joan was often
grubby like that.

Page 29

Brown winter leaves strewed the path. The grass
was bleached and dead. At our approach an old
sheep-dog rattled his chain and looked out of his
kennel. He was shaggy and matted with years.
His bark was so weak that it broke in the middle.
He was a Rip Van Winkle of a sheep-dog—­the
kind of dog you would picture in a fairy-tale.
One couldn’t help feeling that he had accompanied
the shepherd girl and had kept the flock from straying
while she spoke with her visions. All those centuries
ago he had seen her ride away—­ride away
to save France—­and she had not come back.
All through the centuries he had waited; at every
footstep on the path he had come hopefully out from
his kennel, wagging his tail and barking ever more
weakly. He would not believe that she was dead.
And it was difficult to believe it in that ancient
quiet. If ever France needed her, it was now.

Across my memory flashed the words of a dreamer, prophetic
in the light of recent events, “Daughter of
Domremy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken,
thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead.
Call her, King of France, but she will not hear thee.
Cite her by the apparitors to come and receive a robe
of honour, but she will not be found. When the
thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen,
shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl
that gave up her all for her country, thy ear, young
shepherd girl, will have been deaf five centuries.”

Quite illogically it seemed to me that January evening
that this American soldier was the symbol of the power
that had come in her stead.

The barking of the dog had awakened a bowed old Mother
Hubbard lady. She opened the door of her diminutive
castle and peered across the threshold, jingling her
keys.

Would we come in? Ah, Monsieur from America was
there! He was always there when he was not training,
playing with the children and rolling cigarettes.
And Monsieur, the English officer, perhaps he did not
know that she was descended from Joan’s family.
Oh, yes, there was no mistake about it; that was why
she had been made custodian. She must light the
lamp. There! That was better. There
was not much to see, but if we would follow....

We stepped down into a flagged room like a cellar—­cold,
ascetic and bare. There was a big open fire-place,
with a chimney hooded by massive masonry and blackened
by the fires of immemorial winters. This was
where Joan’s parents had lived. She had
probably been born here. The picture that formed
in my mind was not of Joan, but that other woman unknown
to history—­her mother, who after Joan had
left the village and rumours of her battles and banquets
drifted back, must have sat there staring into the
blazing logs, her peasant’s hands folded in
her lap, brooding, wondering, hoping, fearing—­fearing
as the mothers of soldiers have throughout the ages.

And this was Joan’s brother’s room—­a
cheerless place of hewn stone. What kind of a
man could he have been? What were his reflections
as he went about his farm-work and thought of his
sister at the head of armies? Was he merely a
lout or something worse—­the prototype of
our Conscientious Objector: a coward who disguised
his cowardice with moral scruples?

Page 30

And this was Joan’s room—­a cell,
with a narrow slit at the end through which one gained
a glimpse of the church. Before this slit she
had often knelt while the angels drifted from the belfry
like doves to peer in on her. The place was sacred.
How many nights had she spent here with girlish folded
hands, her face ecstatic, the cold eating into her
tender body? I see her blue for lack of charity,
forgotten, unloved, neglected—­the symbol
of misunderstanding and loneliness. They told
her she was mad. She was a laughing stock in the
village. The world could find nothing better
for her to do than driving sheep through the bitter
woodlands; but God found time to send his angels.
Yes, she was mad—­mad as Christ was in Galilee—­mad
enough to save others when she could not save herself.
How nearly the sacrifice of this most child-like of
women parallels the sacrifice of the most God-like
of men! Both were born in a shepherd community;
both forewent the humanity of love and parenthood;
both gave up their lives that the world might be better;
both were royally apparelled in mockery; both followed
their visions; for each the price of following was
death. She, too, was despised and rejected; as
a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so she opened
not her mouth.

That is all there is to see at Domremy; three starveling,
stone-paved rooms, a crumbling church, a garden full
of dead leaves, an old dog growing mangy in his kennel
and the wind-swept cathedral of the woodlands.
The soul of France was born there in the humble body
of a peasant-girl; yes, and more than the soul of
France—­the gallantry of all womanhood.
God must be fond of His peasants; I think they will
be His aristocracy in Heaven.

The old lady led us out of the house. There was
one more thing she wished to show us. The sunset
light was still in the tree-tops, but her eyes were
dim; she thought that night had already gathered.
Holding her lamp above her head, she pointed to a statue
in a niche above the doorway. It had been placed
there by order of the King of France after Joan was
dead. But it wasn’t so much the statue that
she wanted us to look at; it was the mutilations that
were upon it. She was filled with a great trembling
of indignation. “Yes, gaze your fill upon
it, Messieurs,” she said; “it was les
Boches did that. They were here in 1870.
To others she may be a saint, but to them—­Bah!”
and she spat, “a woman is less than a woman always.”

When we turned to go she was still cursing les
Boches beneath her breath, tremblingly holding
up the lamp above her head that she might forget nothing
of their defilement. The old dog rattled his chain
as we passed; he knew us now and did not trouble to
come out. The dead leaves whispered beneath our
tread.

At the gate we halted. I turned to my American
soldier. “How long before you go into the
line?”

He was carrying the little French girl in his arms.
As he glanced up to answer, his face caught the sunset.
“Soon now. The sooner, the better.
She ...,” and I knew he meant no living woman.
“This place ... I don’t know how
to express it. But everything here makes you want
to fight,—­makes you ashamed of standing
idle. If she could do that—­well, I
guess that I....”

Page 31

He made no attempt to fill his eloquent silences;
and so I left. As the car gathered speed, plunging
into the pastoral solitudes, I looked back. The
last sight I had of Domremy was a grey little garden,
made sacred by the centuries, and an American soldier
standing with a French child in his arms, her golden
hair lying thickly against his neck.

On the surface the American is unemotionally practical,
but at heart he is a dreamer, first, last and always.
If the Americans have merited any criticism in France,
it is owing to the vastness of their plans; the tremendous
dream of their preparations postpones the beginning
of the reality. Their mistake, if they have made
a mistake, is an error of generosity. They are
building with a view to flinging millions into the
line when thousands a little earlier would be of superlative
advantage. They had the choice of dribbling their
men over in small contingents or of waiting till they
could put a fighting-force into the field so overwhelming
in equipment and numbers that its weight would be
decisive. They were urged to learn wisdom from
England’s example and not to waste their strength
by putting men into the trenches in a hurry before
they were properly trained. England was compelled
to adopt this chivalrous folly by the crying need of
France. It looked in the Spring of 1917, before
Russia had broken down or the pressure on the Italian
front had become so menacing, as though the Allies
could afford to ask America to conduct her war on the
lines of big business. America jumped at the
chance—­big business being the task to which
her national genius was best suited. If her Allies
could hold on long enough, she would build her fleet
and appear with an army of millions that would bring
the war to a rapid end. Her role was to be that
of the toreador in the European bull-fight.

But big business takes time and usually loses money
at the start. In the light of recent developments,
we would rather have the bird-in-the-hand of 300,000
Americans actually fighting than the promise of a
host a year from now. People at home in America
realised this in January. They were so afraid
that their Allies might feel disappointed. They
were so keen to achieve tangible results in the war
that they grew impatient with the long delay.
They weren’t interested in seeing other nations
going over the top—­the same nations who
had been over so many times; they wanted to see their
sons and brothers at once given the opportunity to
share the wounds and the danger. Their attitude
was Spartan and splendid; they demanded a curtailment
of their respite that they might find themselves afloat
on the crimson tide. The cry of the civilians
in America was identical with that of their men in
France. “Let them take off our khaki or
else hurry us into the trenches. We want to get
started. This waiting makes us tired.”

And the civilians in America had earned a right to
make their demand. Industrially, financially,
philanthropically, from every point of view they had
sacrificed and played the game, both by the Allies
and their army. When they, as civilians, had
been so willing to wear the stigmata of sacrifice,
they were jealous lest their fighting men should be
baulked of their chance of making those sacrifices
appear worth while.

Page 32

There have been many accusations in the States with
regard to the supposed breakdown of their military
organization in France—­accusations inspired
by generosity towards the Allies. From what I
have seen, and I have been given liberal opportunities
to see everything, I do not think that those accusations
are justified. As a combatant of another nation,
I have my standards of comparison by which to judge
and I frankly state that I was amazed with the progress
that had been made. It is a progress based on
a huge scale and therefore less impressive to the
layman than if the scale had been less ambitious.
What I saw were the foundations of an organisation
which can be expanded to handle a fighting-machine
which staggers the imagination. What the layman
expects to see are Hun trophies and Americans coming
out of the line on stretchers. He will see all
that, if he waits long enough, for the American military
hospitals in France are being erected to accommodate
200,000 wounded.

Unfounded optimisms, which under no possible circumstances
could ever have been realised, are responsible for
the disappointment felt in America. Inasmuch
as these optimisms were widely accepted in England
and France, civilian America’s disappointment
will be shared by the Allies, unless some hint of
the truth is told as to what may be expected and what
great preparations are under construction. It
was generally believed that by the spring of 1918
America would have half a million men in the trenches
and as many more behind the lines, training to become
reinforcements. People who spoke this way could
never have seen a hundred thousand men or have stopped
to consider what transport would be required to maintain
them at a distance of more than three thousand miles
from their base. It was also believed that by
the April of 1918, one year after the declaring of
war, America would have manufactured ten thousand
planes, standardised all their parts, trained the
requisite number of observers and pilots, and would
have them flying over the Hun lines. Such beliefs
were pure moonshine, incapable of accomplishment;
but there are facts to be told which are highly honourable.

So far I have tried to give a glimpse of America’s
fighting spirit in facing up to her job; now, in as
far as it is allowed, I want to give a sketch of her
supreme earnestness as proved by what she has already
achieved in France. The earnestness of her civilians
should require no further proof than the readiness
with which they accepted national conscription within
a few hours of entering the war—­a revolutionising
departure which it took England two years of fighting
even to contemplate, and which can hardly be said
to be in full operation yet, so long as conscientious
objectors are allowed to air their so-called consciences.
In America the conscientious objector is not regarded;
he is listened to as only one of two things—­a
deserter or a traitor. The earnestness of America’s
fighting man requires no proving; his only grievance

Page 33

is that he is not in the trenches. Yet so long
as the weight of America is not felt to be turning
the balance dramatically in our favour, the earnestness
of America will be open to challenge both by Americans
and by the Allies. What I saw in France in the
early months of this year has filled me with unbounded
optimism. I feel the elated certainty, as never
before even in the moment of the most successful attack,
that the Hun’s fate is sealed. What is more,
I have grounds for believing that he knows it—­knows
that the collapse of Russia will profit him nothing
because he cannot withstand the avalanche of men from
America. Already he hears them, as I have seen
them, training in their camps from the Pacific to
the Atlantic, racing across the Ocean in their grey
transports, marching along the dusty roads of two
continents, a procession locust-like in multitude,
stretching half about the world, marching and singing
indomitably, “We’ve got four years to
do this job.” From behind the Rhine he has
caught their singing; it grows ever nearer, stronger.
It will take time for that avalanche to pyramid on
the Western Front; but when it has piled up, it will
rush forward, fall on him and crush him. He knows
something else, which fills him with a still more
dire sense of calamity—­that because America’s
honour has been jeopardised, of all the nations now
fighting she will be the last to lay down her arms.
She has given herself four years to do her job; when
her job is ended, it will be with Prussianism as it
was with Jezebel, “They that went to bury her
found no more of her than the skull and the feet and
the palms of her hands. And her carcase was as
dung upon the face of the field, so that men should
not say, ‘This is Jezebel.’”

As an example of what America is accomplishing, I
will take a sample port in France. It was of
tenth-rate importance, little more than a harbour
for coastwise vessels and ocean-going tramps when the
Americans took it over; by the time they have finished,
it will be among the first ports of Europe. It
is only one of several that they are at present enlarging
and constructing. The work already completed
has been done in the main under the direction of the
engineers who marched through London in the July of
last year. I visited the port in January, so
some idea can be gained of how much has been achieved
in a handful of months.

The original French town still has the aspect of a
prosperous fishing-village. There are two main
streets with shops on them; there is one out-of-date
hotel; there are a few modern dwellings facing the
sea. For the rest, the town consists of cottages,
alleys and open spaces where the nets were once spread
to dry. To-day in a vast circle, as far as eye
can reach, a city of huts has grown up. In those
huts live men of many nations, Americans, French, German
prisoners, negroes. They are all engaged in the
stupendous task of construction. The capacity
of the harbour basin is being multiplied fifty times,

Page 34

the berthing capacity trebled, the unloading facilities
multiplied by ten. A railroad yard is being laid
which will contain 225 miles of track and 870 switches.
An immense locomotive-works is being erected for the
repairing and assembling of rolling-stock from America.
It was originally planned to bring over 960 standard
locomotives and 30,000 freight-cars from the States,
all equipped with French couplers and brakes so that
they could become a permanent part of the French railroad
system. These figures have since been somewhat
reduced by the purchase of rolling-stock in Europe.
Reservoirs are being built at some distance from the
town which will be able to supply six millions gallons
of purified water a day. In order to obtain the
necessary quantity of pipe, piping will be torn up
from various of the water-systems in America and brought
across the Atlantic. As the officer, who was
my informant remarked, “Rather than see France
go short, some city in the States will have to haul
water in carts.”

As proof of the efficiency with which materials from
America are being furnished, when the engineers arrived
on the scene with 225 miles of track to lay, they
found 100 miles of rails and spikes already waiting
for them. Of the 870 switches required, 350 were
already on hand. Of the ties required, one-sixth
were piled up for them to be going on with. Not
so bad for a nation quite new to the war-game and living
three thousand miles beyond the horizon!

On further enquiry I learnt that six million cubic
yards of filling were necessary to raise the ground
of the railroad yard to the proper level. In
order that the work may be hurried, dredges are being
brought across the Atlantic and, if necessary, harbour
construction in the States will be curtailed.

I was interested in the personnel employed in this
work. Here, as elsewhere, I found that the engineering
and organising brains of America are largely in France.
One colonel was head of the marble industry in the
States; another had been vice-president of the Pennsylvania
Railroad. Another man, holding a sergeant’s
rank was general manager of the biggest fishing company.
Another, a private in the ranks, was chief engineer
of the American Aluminum Company. A major was
general manager of The Southern Pacific. Another
colonel was formerly controller of the currency and
afterwards president of the Central Trust Company
of Illinois. A captain was chief engineer and
built the aqueducts over the keys of the Florida East
Coast Railroad. As with us, you found men of
the highest social and professional grade serving
in every rank of the American Army; one, a society
man and banker, was running a gang of negroes whose
job it was to shovel sand into cars. In peace
times thirty thousand pounds a year could not have
bought him. What impressed me even more than the
line of communications itself was the quality of the
men engaged on its construction. As one of them
said to me, “Any job that they give us engineers

Page 35

to do over here is likely to be small in comparison
with the ones we’ve had to tackle in America.”
The man who said this had previously done his share
in the building of the Panama Canal. There were
others I met, men who had spanned rivers in Alaska,
flung rails across the Rockies, built dams in the
arid regions, performed engineering feats in China,
Africa, Russia—­in all parts of the world.
They were trained to be undaunted by the hugeness of
any task; they’d always beaten Nature in the
long run. Their cheerful certainty that America
in France was more than up to her job maintained a
constant wave of enthusiasm.

It may be asked why it is necessary in an old-established
country like France, to waste time in enlarging harbours
before you can make effective war. The answer
is simple: France has not enough ports of sufficient
size to handle the tonnage that is necessary to support
the Allied armies within her borders. America’s
greatest problem is tonnage. She has the men
and the materials in prodigal quantities, but they
are all three thousand miles away. Before the
men can be brought over, she has to establish her
means of transport and line of communications, so
as to make certain that she can feed and clothe them
when once she has got them into the front-line.
There are two ways of economising on tonnage.
One is to purchase in Europe. In this way, up
to February, The Purchasing Board of the Americans
had saved ninety days of transatlantic traffic.
The other way is to have modern docks, well railroaded,
so that vessels can be unloaded in the least possible
space of time and sent back for other cargoes.
Hence it has been sane economy on the part of America
to put much of her early energy into construction
rather than into fighting. Nevertheless, it has
made her an easy butt for criticism both in the States
and abroad, since the only proof to the newspaper-reader
that America is at war is the amount of front-line
that she is actually defending.

I had heard much of what was going on at a certain
place which was to be the intermediate point in the
American line of communications. I had studied
a blue-print map and had been amazed at its proportions.
I was told, and can well believe, that when completed
it was to be the biggest undertaking of its kind in
the world. It was to be six and a half miles
long by about one mile broad. It was to have four
and a half million feet of covered storage and ten
million feet of open storage. It was to contain
over two hundred miles of track in its railroad yard
and to house enough of the materials of war to keep
a million men fully equipped for thirty days.
In addition to this it was to have a plant, not for
the repairing, but merely for the assembling of aeroplanes,
which would employ twenty thousand men.

Page 36

I arrived there at night. There was no town.
One stepped from the train into the open country.
Far away in the distance there was a glimmering of
fires and the scarlet of sparks shooting up between
bare tree-tops. My first impression was of the
fragrance of pines and, after that, as I approached
the huts, of a memory more definite and elusively
familiar. The swinging of lanterns helped to bring
it back: I was remembering lumber-camps in the
Rocky Mountains. The box-stove in the shack in
which I slept that night and the roughly timbered
walls served to heighten the illusion that I was in
America. Next morning the illusion was completed.
Here were men with mackinaws and green elk boots;
here were cook-houses in which the only difference
was that a soldier did the cooking instead of a Chinaman;
and above all, here were fir and pines growing out
of a golden soil, with a soft wind blowing overhead.
And here, in an extraordinary way, the democracy of
a lumber-camp had been reproduced: every one from
the Colonel down was a worker; it was difficult, apart
from their efficiency, to tell their rank.

Early in the morning I started out on a gasolene-speeder
to make the tour. At an astonishing rate, for
the work had only been in hand three months, the vast
acreage was being tracked and covered with the sheds.
The sheds were not the kind I had been used to on my
own front; they were built out of anything that came
handy, commenced with one sort of material and finished
with another. Sometimes the cross-pieces in the
roofs were still sweating, proving that it was only
yesterday they had been cut down in the nearby wood.
There was no look of permanence about anything.
As the officer who conducted me said, “It’s
all run up—­a race against time.”
And then he added with a twinkle in his eye, “But
it’s good enough to last four years.”

This was America in France in every sense of the word.
One felt the atmosphere of rush. In the buildings,
which should have been left when materials failed,
but which had been carried to completion by pioneer
methods, one recognised the resourcefulness of the
lumberman of the West. Then came a touch of Eastern
America, to me almost more replete with memory and
excitement. In a flash I was transferred from
a camp in France to the rock-hewn highway of Fifth
Avenue, running through groves of sky-scrapers, garnished
with sunshine and echoing with tripping footsteps.
I could smell the asphalt soaked with gasolene and
the flowers worn by the passing girls. The whole
movement and quickness of the life I had lost flooded
back on me. The sound I heard was the fate motif
of the frantic opera of American endeavour. The
truly wonderful thing was that I should hear it here,
in a woodland in France—­the rapid tapping
of a steel-riveter at work.

I learnt afterwards that I was not the only one to
be carried away by that music, as of a monstrous wood-pecker
in an iron forest. The first day the riveter
was employed, the whole camp made excuses to come
and listen to it. They stood round it in groups,
deafened and thrilled—­and a little homesick.
What the bag-pipe is to the Scotchman, the steel-riveter
is to the American—­the instrument which
best expresses his soul to a world which is different.

Page 37

I found that the riveter was being employed in the
erection of an immense steel and concrete refrigerating
plant, which was to have machinery for the production
of its own ice and sufficient meat-storage capacity
to provide a million men for thirty days. The
water for the ice was being obtained from wells which
had been already sunk. There was only surface
water there when the Americans first struck camp.

As another clear-cut example of what America is accomplishing
in France, I will take an aviation-camp. This
camp is one of several, yet it alone will be turning
out from 350 to 400 airmen a month. The area
which it covers runs into miles. The Americans
have their own ideas of aerial fighting tactics, which
they will teach here on an intensive course and try
out on the Hun from time to time. Some of their
experts have had the advantage of familiarising themselves
with Hun aerial equipment and strategy; they were
on his side of the line at the start of the war as
neutral military observers. I liked the officer
at the head of this camp; I was particularly pleased
with some of his phrases. He was one of the first
experts to fly with a Liberty engine. Without
giving any details away, he assured me impressively
that it was “an honest-to-God engine”
and that his planes were equipped with “an honest-to-God
machine-gun,” and that he looked forward with
cheery anticipation to the first encounter his chaps
would have with “the festive Hun.”
He was one of the few Americans I had met who spoke
with something of our scornful affection for the enemy.
It indicated to me his absolute certainty that he
could beat him at the flying game. On his lips
the Hun was never the German or the Boche, but always
“the festive Hun.” You can afford
to speak kindly, almost pityingly of some one you
are going to vanquish. Hatred often indicates
fear. Jocularity is a victorious sign.

When I was in America last October a great effort
was being made to produce an overwhelming quantity
of aeroplanes. Factories, both large and small,
in every State were specializing on manufacturing certain
parts, the idea being that so time would be saved and
efficiency gained. These separate parts were
to be collected and assembled at various big government
plants. The aim was to turn out planes as rapidly
as Ford Cars and to swamp the Hun with numbers.
America is unusually rich in the human as well as
the mechanical material for crushing the enemy in
the air. In this service, as in all the others,
the only difficulty that prevents her from making her
fighting strength immediately felt is the difficulty
of transportation. The road of ships across the
Atlantic has to be widened; the road of steel from
the French ports to the Front has to be tracked and
multiplied in its carrying capacity. These difficulties
on land and water are being rapidly overcome:
by adding to the means of transportation; by increasing
the efficiency of the transport facilities already

Page 38

existing; by lightening the tonnage to be shipped from
the States by buying everything that is procurable
in Europe. In the early months much of the available
Atlantic tonnage was occupied with carrying the materials
of construction: rails, engines, concrete, lumber,
and all the thousand and one things that go to the
housing of armies. This accounts for America’s
delay in starting fighting. For three years Europe
had been ransacked; very much of what America would
require had to be brought. Such work does not
make a dramatic impression on other nations, especially
when they are impatient. Its value as a contribution
towards defeating the Hun is all in the future.
Only victories win applause in these days. Nevertheless,
such work had to be done. To do it thoroughly,
on a sufficiently large scale, in the face of the
certain criticism which the delay for thoroughness
would occasion, demanded bravery and patriotism on
the part of those in charge of affairs. By the
time this book is published their high-mindedness
will have begun to be appreciated, for the results
of it will have begun to tell. The results will
tell increasingly as the war progresses. America
is determined to have no Crimea scandals. The
contentment and good condition of her troops in France
will be largely owing to the organisation and care
with which her line of communications has been constructed.

The purely business side of war is very dimly comprehended
either by the civilian or the combatant. The
combatant, since he does whatever dying is to be done,
naturally looks down on the business man in khaki.
The civilian is inclined to think of war in terms of
the mobile warfare of other days, when armies were
rarely more than some odd thousands strong and were
usually no more than expeditionary forces. Such
armies by reason of their rapid movements and the comparative
fewness of their numbers, were able to live on the
countries through which they marched. But our
fighting forces of to-day are the manhood of nations.
The fronts which they occupy can scarcely boast a blade
of grass. The towns which lie behind them have
been picked clean to the very marrow. France
herself, into which a military population of many
millions has been poured, was never at the best of
times entirely self-supporting. Whatever surplus
of commodities the Allies possessed, they had already
shared long before the spring of 1917. When America
landed into the war, she found herself in the position
of one who arrives at an overcrowded inn late at night.
Whatever of food or accommodation the inn could afford
had been already apportioned; consequently, before
America could put her first million men into the trenches,
she had to graft on to France a piece of the living
tissue of her own industrial system—­whole
cities of repair-shops, hospitals, dwellings, store-houses,
ice-plants, etc., together with the purely business
personnel that go with them. These cities, though
initially planned to maintain and furnish a minimum
number of fighting men, had to be capable of expansion
so that they could ultimately support millions.

Page 39

Here are some facts and statistics which illustrate
the big business of war as Americans have undertaken
it. They have had to erect cold storage-plants,
with mechanical means for ice-manufacture, of sufficient
capacity to hold twenty-five million pounds of beef
always in readiness.

They are at present constructing two salvage depots
which, when completed, will be the largest in the
world. Here they will repair and make fit for
service again, shoes, harness, clothing, webbing,
tentage, rubber-boots, etc. Attached to these
buildings there are to be immense laundries which
will undertake the washing for all the American forces.
In connection with the depots, there will be a Salvage
Corps, whose work is largely at the Front. The
materials which they collect will be sent back to
the depots for sorting. Under the American system
every soldier, on coming out of the trenches, will
receive a complete new outfit, from the soles of his
feet to the crown of his head. “This,”
the General who informed me said tersely, “is
our way of solving the lice-problem.”

The Motor Transport also has its salvage depot.
Knock-down buildings and machinery have been brought
over from the States, and upwards of 4,000 trained
mechanics for a start. This depot is also responsible
for the repairs of all horse-drawn transport, except
the artillery. The Quartermaster General’s
Department alone will have 35,000 motor propelled
vehicles and a personnel of 160,000 men.

Every effort is being made to employ labour-saving
devices to the fullest extent. The Supply Department
expects to cut down its personnel by two-thirds through
the efficient use of machinery and derricks.
The order compelling all packages to be standardized
in different graded sizes, so that they can be forwarded
directly to the Front before being broken, has already
done much to expedite transportation. The dimensions
of the luggage of a modern army can be dimly realized
when it is stated that the American armies will initially
require twenty-four million square feet of covered
and forty-one million of unroofed storage—­not
to mention the barrack space.

Within the next few months they will require bakeries
capable of feeding one million and a quarter men.
These bakeries are divided into: the field bakeries,
which are portable, and the mechanical bakeries which
are stationary and on the line of communications.
One of the latter had just been acquired and was described
to me when I was in the American area. It was
planned throughout with a view to labour-saving.
It was so constructed that it could take the flour
off the cars and, with practically no handling, convert
it into bread at the rate of 750,000 lbs. a day.
This struck me as a peculiarly American contribution
to big business methods; but on expressing this opinion
I was immediately corrected. This form of bakery
was a British invention, which has been in use for
some time on our lines. The Americans owed their
possession of the bakery to the courtesy of the British
Government, who had postponed their own order and allowed
the Americans to fill theirs four months ahead of
their contract.

Page 40

This is a sample of the kind of discovery that I was
perpetually making. Two out of three times when
I thought I had run across a characteristically American
expression of efficiency, I was told that it had been
copied from the British. I learnt more about my
own army’s business efficiency in studying it
secondhand with the Americans, than I had ever guessed
existed in all the time that I had been an inhabitant
of the British Front. It is characteristic of
us as a people that we like to pretend that we muddle
our way into success. We advertise our mistakes
and camouflage our virtues. We are almost ashamed
of gaining credit for anything that we have done well.
There is a fine dishonesty about this self-belittlement;
but it is not always wise. During these first
few months of their being at war the Americans have
discovered England in almost as novel a sense as Columbus
did America. It was a joy to be with them and
to watch their surprise. The odd thing was that
they had had to go to France to find us out.
Here they were, the picked business men of the world’s
greatest industrial nation, frankly and admiringly
hats off to British “muddle-headed” methods.
Not only were they hats off to the methods, many of
which they were copying, but they were also hats off
to the generous helpfulness of our Government and
Military authorities in the matter of advice, co-operation
and supplies. From the private in the ranks,
who had been trained by British N.C.O.’s and
Officers, to the Generals at the head of departments,
there was only one feeling expressed for Great Britain—­that
of a new sincerity of friendship and admiration.
“John Bull and his brother Jonathan” had
become more than an empty phrase; it expressed a true
and living relation.

A similar spirit of appreciation had grown up towards
the French—­not the emotional, histrionic,
Lafayette appreciation with which the American troops
sailed from America, but an appreciation based on
sympathy and a knowledge of deeds and character.
I think this spirit was best illustrated at Christmas
when all over France, wherever American troops were
billeted, the rank and file put their hands deep into
their pockets to give the refugee children of their
district the first real Christmas they had had since
their country was invaded. Officers were selected
to go to Paris to do the purchasing of the presents,
and I know of at least one case in which the men’s
gift was so generous that there was enough money left
over to provide for the children throughout the coming
year.

In France one hears none of that patronising criticism
which used to exist in America with regard to the
older nations—­none of those arrogant assertions
that “because we are younger we can do things
better.” The bias of the American in France
is all the other way; he is near enough to the Judgment
Day, which he is shortly to experience, to be reverent
in the presence of those who have stood its test.
He is in France to learn as well as to contribute.

Page 41

Between himself and his brother soldiers of the British
and French armies, there exists an entirely manly
and reciprocal respect. And it is reciprocal;
both the individual British and French fighting-man,
now that they have seen the American soldier, are
clamorous to have him adjacent to their line.
The American has scarcely been blooded at this moment,
and yet, having seen him, they are both certain that
he’s not the pal to let them down.

The confidence that the American soldier has created
among his soldier-Allies was best expressed to me
by a British officer: “The British, French
and Americans are the three great promise-keeping
nations. For the first time in history we’re
standing together. We’re promise-keepers
banded together against the falsehood of Germany—­that’s
why. It isn’t likely that we shall start
to tell lies to one another.”

Not likely!

III

THE WAR OF COMPASSION

Officially America declared war on Germany in the
spring of 1917; actually she committed her heart to
the allied cause in September, 1914, when the first
shipment of the supplies of mercy arrived in Paris
from the American Red Cross.

There are two ways of waging war: you can fight
with artillery and armed men; you can fight with ambulances
and bandages. There’s the war of destruction
and the war of compassion. The one defeats the
enemy directly with force; the other defeats him indirectly
by maintaining the morale of the men who are fighting
and, what is equally important, of the civilians behind
the lines. Belgium would not be the utterly defiant
and unconquered nation that she is to-day, had it not
been for the mercy of Hoover and his disciples.
Their voluntary presence made the captured Belgian
feel that he was earning the thanks of all time—­that
the eyes of the world were upon him. They were
neutrals, but their mere presence condemned the cause
that had brought them there. Their compassion
waged war against the Hun. The same is true of
the American Ambulance Units which followed the French
Armies into the fiercest of the carnage. They
confirmed the poilu in his burning sense of injustice.
That they, who could have absented themselves, should
choose the damnation of destruction and dare the danger,
convinced the entire French nation of its own righteousness.
And it was true of the girls at the American hospitals
who nursed the broken bodies which their brothers
had rescued. It was true of Miss Holt’s
Lighthouse for the training of blinded soldiers,
which she established in Paris within eight months
of war’s commencement. It was true of the
American Relief Clearing House in Paris which, up
to January, 1917, had received 291 shipments and had
distributed eight million francs. By the time
America put on armour, the American Red Cross, as the
army’s expert in the strategy of compassion,
found that it had to take over more than eighty-six
separate organisations which had been operating in
France for the best part of two years.

Page 42

One cannot show pity with indignant hands and keep
the mind neutral. The Galilean test holds true,
“He who is not for me is against me.”
You cannot leave houses, lands, children, wife—­everything
that counts—­for the Kingdom of Heaven’s
sake without developing a rudimentary aversion for
the devil. All of which goes to prove that America’s
heart was fighting for the Allies long before her ambassador
requested his passports from the Kaiser.

The American Red Cross Commission landed in France
on the 12th of June, 1917, seven days ahead of the
Expeditionary Force. It had taken less than five
days to organise. Its first act was to convey
a monetary gift to the French hospitals. The
first actual American Red Cross contribution was made
in April to the Number Five British Base Hospital.
The first American soldiers in France were doctors
and nurses. The first American fighting done
in France was done with the weapons of pity.
The chief function of the American Red Cross up to
the present has been to “carry on” and
to bridge the gap of unavoidable delays while the
army is preparing.

To prove that this “war of compassion”
is no idle phrase, let me illustrate with one dramatic
instance. When the Italian line broke under the
pressure of Hun artillery and propaganda, the American
Red Cross sent representatives forward to inaugurate
relief work for the 700,000 refugees, who were pouring
southward from the Friuti and Veneto, homeless, hungry,
possessing nothing but misfortune, spreading despair
and panic every step of the journey. Their bodies
must be cared for—­that was evident; it
would be easy for them to carry disease throughout
Italy. But the disease of their minds was an even
greater danger; if their demoralisation were not checked,
it would inevitably prove contagious.

The first two representatives of the American Red
Cross arrived in Rome on November 5th, with a quarter
of a million dollars at their disposal. That
night they had a soup-kitchen going and fed 400 people.
Their first day’s work is the record of an amazing
spurt of energy. In that first day they sent
money for relief to every American Consul in the districts
affected. They mobilised the American colony in
Rome and arranged by wire for similar organisations
to be formed throughout the length and breadth of
Italy, wherever they could lay hands on an American.
On all principal junction points through which the
refugees would pass, soup-kitchens were installed
and clothes were purchased and ready to be distributed
as the trains pulled into the stations. They
were badly needed, for the passengers had endured all
the rigours of the retreat with the soldiers.
They had been under shell and machine-gun fire.
They had been bombed by aeroplanes. No horror
of warfare had been spared them. Their clothes
were verminous with weeks of wearing. They were
packed like cattle. Babies born on the journey
were wrapped in newspapers. There were instances
of officers taking off their shirts that the little
bodies should not go naked. A telegram was at
once despatched to Paris for food and clothes and
hospital supplies. Twenty-four cars came through
within a week, despite the unusual military traffic.
This ends the list of what was accomplished by two
men in one day.

Page 43

The great thing was to make the demoralised Italians
feel that America was on the spot and helping them.
The sending of troops could not have reused their
fighting spirit. They were sick of fighting.
What they needed was the assurance that the world
was not wholly brutal—­that there was some
one who was merciful, who did not condemn and who
was moved by their sorrow. This assurance the
prompt action of the American Red Cross gave.
It restored in the affirmative with mercy, precisely
the quality which Hun fury and propaganda had destroyed
with lies. It restored to them their belief in
the nobility of mankind, out of which belief grows
all true courage.

As the work progressed, it branched out on a much
larger scale, embracing civilian, military and child-welfare
activities. In the month of November upward of
half a million lire were placed in the hands of American
consuls for distribution. One million lire were
contributed for the benefit of soldiers’ families.
A permanent headquarters was established with trained
business men and men who had had experience under
Hoover in Belgium in charge of its departments.
Over 100 hospitals and two principal magazines of hospital
stores had been lost in the retreat. The American
Red Cross made up this deficiency by supplying the
bedding for no less than 3,000 beds. Five weeks
after the first two representatives had reached Rome
three complete ambulance sections, each section being
made up of 20 ambulances, a staff car, a kitchen trailer
and 33 men, were turned over to the Italian Medical
Service of the third Army. By the first week
in December the stream of refugees had practically
stopped. Italy had been made to realise that
she was not fighting alone; her morale had returned
to her. This work, which had been initially undertaken
from purely altruistic motives, had proved to possess
a value of the highest military importance—­an
importance of the spirit utterly out of proportion
to the money and labour expended. Magnanimity
arouses magnanimity. In this case it revived
the flame of Garibaldi which had all but died.
It achieved a strategic victory of the soul which no
amount of military assistance could have accomplished.
The victory of the American Red Cross on the Italian
Front is all the more significant since it was not
until months later that Congress declared war on Austria.

The campaign which the American Red Cross is waging
in every country in which it operates, is frankly
an “out to win” campaign. To win the
war is its one and only object. What the army
does for the courage of the body, the Red Cross does
for the courage of the mind. It builds up the
hearts and hopes of people who in three and a half
years have grown numb. It restores the human
touch to their lives and, with it, the spiritual horizon.
Its business, while the army is still preparing, is
to bring home to the Allies in every possible way the
fact that America, with her hundred and ten millions
of population, is in the war with them, eager to play
the game, anxious to sacrifice as they have sacrificed,
to give her man-power and resources as they have done,
until justice has been established for every man and
nation.

Page 44

It is necessary to lay stress on this programme since
it differs greatly from the popular conception of
the functions of the Red Cross in the battle area.
It was on the field of Solferino in 1859, that Henri
Dunant went out before the fury had spent itself to
tend the wounded. It was here that he was fired
with his great ambition to found a non-combatant service,
which should recognise no enemies and be friends with
every army. His ambition was realised when in
1864 the Conference at Geneva chose the Swiss flag,
reversed, as its emblem—­a red cross on
a field of white—­and laid the foundations
for those international understandings which have
since formed for all combatants, except the Hun in
this present warfare, the protective law for the sick
and wounded. The original purpose of the Red Cross
still fills the imagination of the masses to the exclusion
of all else that it is doing. Directly the term
“Red Cross” is mentioned the picture that
forms in most men’s minds is of ambulances galloping
through the thick of battle-smoke and of devoted stretcher-bearers
who brave danger not to kill, but in order that they
may save lives.

This war has changed all that. To-day the Red
Cross has to minister to not the wounded of armies
only, but to the wounded of nations. In a country
like France, with trenches dug the entire length of
her eastern frontier and vast territories from which
the entire population has been evacuated, the wounds
of her armies are small in comparison with the wounds,
bodily and mental, of her civil population—­wounds
which are the outcome of over three years of privation.
When the civil population of any country has lost
its pluck, no matter how splendid the spirit of its
soldiers, its armies become paralysed. The civilians
can commence peace negotiations behind the backs of
their men in the trenches. They can insist on
peace by refusing to send them ammunition and supplies.
As a matter of fact the morale of the soldiers varies
directly with the morale of the civilians for whom
they fight. Behind every soldier stand a woman
and a group of children. Their safety is his
inspiration. If they are neglected, his sacrifice
is belittled. If they beg that he should lay
down his arms, his determination is weakened.
It is therefore a vital necessity, quite apart from
the humanitarian aspect, that the wounds of the civilians
of belligerent countries should be cared for.
If the civilians are allowed to become disheartened
and cowardly, the heroic ideal of their fighting-men
is jeopardised. This fact has been recognised
by the Red Cross Societies of all countries in the
present war; a large part of their energies has been
devoted to social and relief work of a civil nature.
Even in their purely military departments, the comfort
of the troops claims quite as much attention as their
medical treatment and hospitalisation. As a matter
of fact, the actual carrying of the wounded out of
the trenches to the comparative safety of the dressing

Page 45

station is usually done by combatants. A man has
to live continually under shell-fire to acquire the
immunity to fear which passes for courage. The
bravest man is likely to get “jumpy,” if
he only faces up to a bombardment occasionally.
There are other reasons why combatants should do the
stretcher-bearing which do not need elaborating.
The combatants have an expert knowledge of their own
particular frontage; they are “wise” to
the barraged areas; they are “up front”
and continually coming and going, so it is often an
economy of man-power for them to attend to their own
wounded in the initial stages; they are the nearest
to a comrade when he falls and all carry the necessary
first-aid dressings; the emblem of the Red Cross has
proved to be only a slight protection, as the Hun
is quite likely not to respect it. What I am
driving at is that the Red Cross has had to adapt itself
to the new conditions of modern warfare, so that very
many of its most important present-day functions are
totally different from what popular fancy imagines.

The American Red Cross has its French Headquarters
in a famous gambling club in the Place de la Concorde.
It is somewhat strange to pass through these rooms
where rakes once flung away fortunes, and to find
them industriously orderly with the conscience of an
imported nation. By far the larger part of the
staff are business men of the Wall Street type—­not
at all the kind who have been accustomed to sentimentalise
over philanthropy. There is also a sprinkling
of trained social workers, clergy, journalists, and
university professors. The medical profession
is represented by some of the leading specialists
of the States, but at Headquarters they are distinctly
in the minority. The purely medical work of the
American Red Cross forms only a part of its total
activities. The men at the head of affairs are
bankers, merchants, presidents of corporations—­men
who have been trained to think in millions and to
visualise broad areas. Girls are very much in
evidence. They are usually volunteers, drawn
from all classes, who offered their services to do
anything that would help. To-day they are typists,
secretaries, stenographers, nurses.

The organisation is divided into three main departments:
the department of military affairs, of civil affairs
and of administration. Under these departments
come a variety of bureaus: the bureau of rehabilitation
and reconstruction; of the care and prevention of
tuberculosis; of needy children and infant mortality;
of refugees and relief; of the re-education of the
French mutiles; of supplies; of the rolling canteens
for the French armies; of the U.S. Army Division;
of the Military, Medical and Surgical Division, etc.
They are too numerous to mention in detail. The
best way I can convey the picture of immense accomplishment
is to describe what I actually saw in the field of
operations.

Page 46

The first place I will take you to is Evian, because
here you see the tragedy and need of France as embodied
in individuals. Evian-les-Bains is on Lake Geneva,
looking out across the water to Switzerland. It
is the first point of call across the French frontier
for the repatries returning from their German bondage.
When the Boche first swept down on the northern provinces
he pushed the French civilian population behind him.
He has since kept them working for him as serfs, labouring
in the captured coal-mines, digging his various lines
of defences, setting up wire-entanglements, etc.
Apart from the testimony of repatriated French civilians,
I myself have seen messages addressed by Frenchmen
to their wives, scrawled surreptitiously on the planks
of Hun dug-outs in the hope that one day the dug-outs
would be captured, and the messages passed on by a
soldier of the Allies. After three and a half
years of enforced labour, many of these captured civilians
are worked out. To the Boche, with his ever-increasing
food-shortage, they represent useless mouths.
Instead of filling them he is driving their owners
back, broken and useless, by way of Switzerland.
To him human beings are merchandise to be sold upon
the hoof like cattle. No spiritual values enter
into the bargain. When the body is exhausted it
is sent to the knacker’s, as though it belonged
to a worn-out horse. The entire attitude is materialistic
and degrading. Evian-les-Bains, the once gay
gambling resort of the cosmopolitan, has become the
knacker’s shop for French civilians exhausted
by their German servitude. The Hun shoves them
across the border at the rate of about 1,300 a day.
From the start I have always felt that this war was
a crusade; what I saw at Evian made me additionally
certain. When I was in the trenches I never had
any hatred of the Boche. Probably I shall lose
my hatred in pity for him when I get to the Front again—­but
for the present I hate him. It’s here in
France that one sees what a vileness he has created
in the children’s and women’s lives.

I took the night train down from Paris. Early
in the morning I woke up to find myself in the gorges
of the Alps, high peaks with romantic Italian-looking
settings soaring on every side. At noon we reached
Lake Geneva, lying slate-coloured and sombre beneath
a wintry sky. That afternoon I saw the train
of repatries arrive.

I was on the platform when the train pulled into the
station. It might have been a funeral cortege,
only there was a horrible difference: the corpses
pretended to be alive. The American Ambulance
men were there in force. They climbed into the
carriages and commenced to help the infirm to alight.
The exiles were all so stiff with travel that they
could scarcely move at first. The windows of the
train were grey with faces. Such faces!
All of them old, even the little children’s.
The Boche makes a present to France of only such human
wreckage as is unuseful for his purposes. He
is an acute man of business. The convoy consisted
of two classes of persons—­the very ancient
and the very juvenile. You can’t set a
man of eighty to dig trenches and you can’t
make a prostitute out of a girl-child of ten.
The only boys were of the mal-nourished variety.
Men, women and children—­they all had the
appearance of being half-witted.

Page 47

They were terribly pathetic. As I watched them
I tried to picture to myself what three and a half
long years of captivity must have meant. How
often they must have dreamt of the exaltation of this
day—­and now that it had arrived, they were
not exalted. They had the look of people so spiritually
benumbed that they would never know despair or exaltation
again. They had a broken look; their shoulders
were crushed and their skirts bedraggled. Many
of them carried babies—­pretty little beggars
with flaxen hair. It wasn’t difficult to
guess their parentage.

As they were herded on the platform a low, strangled
kind of moaning went up. I watched individual
lips to see where the sound came from. I caught
no movement. The noise was the sighing of tired
animals. Every one had some treasured possession.
Here was an old man with an alarm-clock; there an
aged woman with an empty bird-cage. A boy carried
half-a-dozen sauce-pans strung together. Another
had a spare pair of patched boots under his arm.
Quite a lot of them clutched a bundle of umbrellas.
I found myself reflecting that these were the remnants
of families who had been robbed of everything that
they valued in the world. Whatever they had saved
from the ruin ought to represent the possession which
had claimed most of their affections, and yet—!
What did an alarm-clock, an empty bird-cage, a pair
of patched boots, a string of sauce-pans, a bundle
of ragged umbrellas signify in any life? What
utter poverty, if these were the best that they could
save!

There was a band on the platform, consisting mainly
of bugles and drums, to welcome them. The leader
is reputed to be the laziest man in the French Army.
It is said that they tried him at everything and then,
in despair, sent him to Evian to drum forgotten happiness
into the bones of repatries. Whatever his former
military record, he now does his utmost to impersonate
the defiant and impassioned soul of France. His
moustaches are curled fiercely. His brows are
heavy as thunderclouds. When he drums, the veins
swell out in his neck with the violence of his energy.

Suddenly, with an ominous preliminary rumble, the
band struck up the Marseillaise. You should have
seen the change in this crowd of corpses. You
must remember that these people had been so long accustomed
to lies and snares that it would probably take days
to persuade them that they were actually safe home
in France.

As the battle-song for which they had suffered shook
the air their lips rustled like leaves. There
was hardly any sound—­only a hoarse whisper.
Then, all of a sudden, words came—­an inarticulate,
sobbing commotion. Tears blinded the eyes of
every spectator, even those who had witnessed similar
scenes often; we were crying because the singing was
so little human.

Page 48

“Vive la France! Vive la France!”
They waved flags—­not the tri-colour, but
flags which had been given them in Switzerland.
They clung together dazed, women with slatternly dresses,
children with peaked faces, men unhappy and unshaven.
A woman caught sight of my uniform. “Vive
l’Angleterre,” she cried, and they all
came stumbling forward to embrace me. It was
horrible. They creaked like automatons.
They gestured and mouthed, but the soul had been crushed
out of their eyes. You don’t need any proofs
of Hun atrocities; the proofs are to be seen at Evian.
There are no severed hands, no crucified bodies; only
hearts that have been mutilated. Sorrow is at
its saddest when it cannot even contrive to appear
dignified. There is no dignity about the repatries
at Evian, with their absurd umbrellas, sauce-pans,
patched-boots, alarm-clocks and bird-cages. They
do not appeal to one as sacrificed patriots.
There is no nobility in their vacant stare. They
create a cold feeling of bodily decay—­only
it is the spirit that is dead and gangrenous.

There is a blasphemous story by Leonid Andreyev, which
recounts the bitterness of the after years of Lazarus
and the mischief Christ wrought in recalling him from
the grave. After his unnatural return to life
there was a blueness as of putrescence beneath his
pallor; an iciness to his touch; a choking silence
in his presence; a horror in his gaze, as if he were
remembering his three days in the sepulchre—­as
if forbidden knowledge groped behind his eyes.
He rarely looked at any one; there were none who courted
his glance, who did not creep away to die. The
terror of his fame spread beyond Bethany. Rome
heard of him, and at that safe distance laughed.
It did not laugh after Caesar Augustus had sent for
him. Caesar Augustus was a god upon earth; he
could not die. But when he had questioned Lazarus,
peeped through the windows of his eyes, and read what
lay hidden in that forbidden memory, he commanded
that red-hot irons should quench such sight for ever.
From Rome Lazarus groped his way back to Palestine
and there, long years after his Saviour had been crucified,
continued to stumble through his own particular Gethsemane
of blindness. I thought of that story in the
presence of this crowd, which carried with it the
taint of the grave.

But the band was still playing the Marseillaise—­over
and over it played it. With each repetition it
was as though these people, three years dead, made
another effort to cast aside their shrouds. Little
by little something was happening—­something
wonderful. Backs were straightening; skirts were
being caught up; resolution was rippling from face
to face—­it passed and re-passed with each
new roll of the drums. The hoarse cries and moaning
with which we had commenced were gradually transforming
themselves into singing.

There were some who were too weak to walk; these were
carried by the American Red Cross men into the waiting
ambulances. The remainder were marshalled into
a disorderly procession and led out of the station
by the band.

Page 49

We were moving down the hill to the palaces beside
the lake—­the palaces to which all France
used to troop for pleasure. We moved soddenly
at first, shuffling in our steps. But the drums
were still rolling out their defiance and the bugles
were still blowing. The laziest man in the French
Army was doing his utmost to belie his record.
The ill-shod, flattened feet took up the music.
They began to dance. Were there ever feet less
suited to dancing? That they should dance was
the acme of tragedy. Stockings fell down in creases
about the ankles. Women commenced to jig their
Boche babies in their arms; consumptive men and ancients
waved their sauce-pans and grotesque bundles of umbrellas.
The sight was damnable. It was a burlesque.
It pierced the heart. What right had the Boche
to leave these people so comic after he had squeezed
the life-blood out of them?

All his insults to humanity became suddenly typified
in these five hundred jumping tatterdemalions—­the
way in which he had plundered the world of its youth,
its cleanness, its decency. I felt an anger which
battlefields had never aroused, where men moulder above
ground and become unsightly beneath the open sky.
The slain of battlefields were at least motionless;
they did not gape and grin at you with the dreadful
humour of these perambulating dead. I felt the
Galilean passion which animates every Red Cross worker
at Evian: the agony to do something to make these
murdered people live again. This last convoy
came, I discovered, from a city behind the Boche lines
against which last summer I had often directed fire.
It was full in sight from my observing station.
I had watched the very houses in which these people,
who now walked beside me, had sheltered. For three
and a half years these women’s bodies had been
at the Hun’s mercy. I tried to bring the
truth home to myself. Their men and young girls
had been left behind. They themselves had been
flung back on overburdened France only because they
were no longer serviceable. They were returning
actually penniless, though seemingly with money.
The thrifty German makes a practice of seizing all
the good redeemable French money of the repatries
before he lets them escape him, giving them in exchange
worthless paper stuff of his own manufacture, which
has no security behind it and is therefore not negotiable.

We came to the Casino, where endless formalities were
necessary. First of all in the big hall, formerly
devoted to gambling, the repatries were fed at long
tables. As I passed, odd groups seeing my uniform,
hurriedly dropped whatever they were doing and, removing
their caps, stood humbly at attention. There
was fear in their promptness. Where they came
from an officer exacted respect with the flat of his
sword. What a dumb, helpless jumble of humanity!
It was as though the occupants of a morgue had become
galvanised and had temporarily risen from their slabs.

Page 50

The band had been augmented by trumpets. It took
its place in the gallery and deluged the hall with
patriotic fervour. An old man climbed on a table
and yelled, “Vive La France!” But they
had grown tired of shouting; they soon grew tired.
The cry was taken up faintly and soon exhausted itself.
Nothing held their attention for long. Most of
them sat hunched up and inert, weakly crying.
They were not beautiful. They were not like our
men who die in battle. They were animated memories
of horror. “What lies before us? What
lies before us?” That was the question that
their silence asked perpetually. Some of them
had husbands with the French army; others had sweethearts.
What would those men say to the flaxen-haired babies
who nestled against the women’s breasts?
And the sin was not theirs—­they were such
tired, pretty mites. “What lies before us?”
The babies, too, might well have asked that question.
Do you wonder that I at last began to share the Frenchman’s
hatred for the Boche?

An extraordinary person in a white tie, top hat and
evening dress entered. He looked like a cross
between Mr. Gerard’s description of himself
in Berlin and a head-waiter. He evidently expected
his advent to cause a profound sensation. I found
out why: he was the official welcomer to Evian.
Twice a day, for an infinity of days, he had entered
in solemn fashion, faced the same tragic assembly,
made the same fiery oration, gained applause at the
climax of the same rounded periods and allowed his
voice to break in the same rightly timed places.
Having kept his audience in sufficient suspense as
regards his mission, he unwrapped the muffler from
his neck, removed his coat, felt his throat to see
whether it was in good condition, swelled out his
chest, including his waist-coat which was spanned by
the broad ribbon of his office, then let loose the
painter of his emotion and slipped off into the mid-stream
of perfunctory eloquence. With all his disrobing
he had retained his top-hat; he held it in his right
hand with the brim pressed against his thigh, very
much in the manner of a showman at a circus.
It contributed largely to the opulence of his gestures.

He always seemed to have concluded and was always
starting up afresh, as if in reluctant response to
spectral clapping. He called upon the repatries
never to forget the crimes that had been wrought against
them—­to spread abroad the fire of their
indignation, the story of their ravished womanhood
and broken families all over France. They watched
him leaden-eyed and wept softly. To forget, to
forget, that was all that they wanted—­to
blot out all the past. This man with the top-hat
and the evening-dress, he hadn’t suffered—­how
could he understand? They didn’t want to
remember; with those flaxen-haired children against
their breasts the one boon they craved was forgetfulness.
And so they cowered and wept softly. It was intolerable.

Page 51

And now the formalities commenced. They all had
to be medically examined. Questions of every
description were asked them. They were drifted
from bureau to bureau where people sat filling up official
blanks. The Americans see to the children.
They come from living in cellars, from conditions
which are insanitary, from cities in the army zones
where they were underfed. The fear is that they
may spread contagion all over France. When infectious
cases are found the remnants of families have to be
broken up afresh. The mothers collapse on benches
sobbing their hearts out as their children are led
away. For three and a half years everything they
have loved has been led away—­how can they
believe that these Americans mean only mercy?

From three to four hours are spent in completing all
these necessary investigations. Before the repatries
are conducted to their billets, all their clothes
have to be disinfected and every one has to be bathed.
The poor people are utterly worn out by the end of
it—­they have already done a continuous
four days’ journey in cramped trains. Before
being sent to France they have been living for from
two to three weeks in Belgium. The Hun always
sends the repatries to Belgium for a few weeks before
returning them. The reason for this is that they
for the most part come from the army zones, and a few
weeks will make any information they possess out of
date. Another reason is that food is more plentiful
in Belgium, thanks to the Allies’ Relief Commission.
These people have been kept alive on sugar-beets for
the past few months, so it is as well to feed them
at the Allies’ expense for a little while, in
order that they may create a better impression when
they return to France. The American doctors pointed
out to me the pulpy flesh of the children and the
distended stomachs which, to the unpractised eye,
seemed a sign of over-nourishment. “Wind
and water,” they said; “that’s all
these children are. They’ve no stamina.
Sugar-beets are the most economic means of just keeping
the body and the soul together.”

The lights are going out in the Casino. It is
the hour when, in the old days, life would be becoming
most feverish about the gaming tables. In little
forlorn groups the repatries are being conducted to
their temporary quarters in the town. To-morrow
morning before it is light, another train-load will
arrive, the band will again play the Marseillaise,
the American Red Cross workers will again be in attendance,
the gentleman in the top-hat and white-tie will again
make his fiery oration of welcome, his audience will
again pay no attention but will weep softly—­the
tediously heart-rending scene will be rehearsed throughout
in every detail by an entirely new batch of actors.
Twice a day, summer and winter, the same tragedy is
enacted at Evian. It is a continuous, never-ending
performance.

Poor people! These whom I have seen, if they
have no friends to claim them, will re-start their
journey to some strange department on which they will
be billeted as paupers. Here again the American
Red Cross is doing good work, for it sends one of
its representatives ahead to see that proper preparations
have been made for their reception. After they
have reached their destination, it looks them up from
time to time to make sure that they are being well
cared for.

Page 52

If one wants to picture the case of the repatrie in
its true misery, all he needs to do is to convert
it into terms of his own mother or grandmother.
She has lived all her life in the neighbourhood of
Vimy, let us say. She was married there and it
was there that she bore all her children. She
and her husband have saved money; they are substantial
people now and need not fear the future. Their
sons are gaining their own living; one daughter is
married, the others are arriving at the marriageable
age. One day the Hun sweeps down on them.
The sons escape to join the French army; the girls
and their parents stay behind to guard their property.
They are immediately evacuated from Vimy and sent
to some city, such as Drocourt, further behind the
Hun front-line. Here they are gradually robbed
of all their possessions. At the beginning all
their gold is confiscated; later even the mattresses
upon their beds are requisitioned. For three and
a half years they are subjected to both big and petty
tyrannies, till their spirits are so broken that fear
becomes their predominant emotion. The father
is led away to work in the mines. One by one the
daughters are commandeered and sent off into the heart
of Germany, where it will be no one’s business
to guard their virtue. At last the mother is
left with only her youngest child. Of her sons
who are fighting with the French armies she has no
knowledge, whether they are living or dead. Then
one day it is decided by her captors that they have
no further use for her. They part her from her
last remaining child and pack her off by way of Belgium
and Switzerland back to her own country. She
arrives at Evian penniless and half-witted with the
terror of her sorrow. There is no one to claim
her; the part of France that knew her is all behind
the German lines. A label is tied to her, as
if she was a piece of baggage, and she is shipped off
to Avignon, let us say. She has never been in
the South before; it is a foreign country to her.
Poverty and adversity have broken her pride; she has
nothing left that will command respect. There
is nothing left in life to which she can fasten her
affections. Such utter forlornness is never a
welcome sight. Is it to be wondered at that the
strangers to whom she is sent are not always glad
to see her? Is it to be wondered at that, after
her repatriation, she often wilts and dies? Her
sorrow has the appearance of degradation. Wherever
she goes, she is a threat and a peril to the fighting
morale of the civilian population. Yet in her
pre-war kindliness and security she might have been
your mother or mine.

The American Red Cross, by maintaining contact with
such people, is keeping them reminded that they are
not utterly deserted—­that the whole of
civilised humanity cares tremendously what becomes
of them and is anxious to lighten the load of their
sacrifice.

* * * *
*

Page 53

I have before me a pile of sworn depositions, made
by exiles returned from the invaded territories.
They are separately numbered and dated; each bears
the name of the region or town from which the repatrie
came. Here are a few extracts which, when pieced
together, form a picture of the life of captured French
civilians behind the German lines. I have carefully
avoided glaring atrocities. Atrocities are as
a rule isolated instances, due to isolated causes.
They occur, but they are not typical of the situation.
The real Hun atrocity is the attitude towards life
which calls chivalry sentiment, fair-play a waste
of opportunity and ruthlessness strength. This
attitude is all summed up in the one word Prussianism.
The repatries have been Prussianised out of their
wholesome joy and belief in life; it is this that
makes them the walking accusations that they are to-day.
In the following depositions they give some glimpses
of the calculated processes by which their happiness
has been murdered.

* * * *
*

“Lately copper, tin, and zinc have been removed
in the factories and amongst the traders, and quite
recently in private houses. For all these requisitions
the Germans gave Requisition Bonds, but private individuals
who received them never got paid the money. To
force men to work ‘voluntarily’ and sign
contracts the Germans employed the following means:
the Germans gave these men nothing to eat, but authorised
their families to send them parcels; these parcels
once in the hands of the Germans are shown to these
unhappy men and are not handed over until they have
signed. About a week ago young boys from the
age of fourteen who had come back from the Ardennes
had to present themselves at the Kdr to be registered
anew; a number of the young people work in the sawmills,
etc.; some have died of privation and fatigue.”

* * * *
*

“A week after Easter this year the population
of Lille was warned by poster that all must be
ready to leave the town. At three o’clock
in the morning private houses were invaded by the
German soldiers; they sorted out women and girls who
were to be deported. There then took place scandalous
scenes: young girls belonging to the most worthy
families in the town had to pass medical visits even
with the speculum and had to endure most atrocious
physical and moral suffering. These young girls
were segregated like beasts anywhere in the rooms of
the town halls and schoolhouses, and were mingled
with the dregs of the population.”

* * * *
*

Page 54

“For a certain time the Germans did not requisition
milk and allowed it to be sold, but now this is forbidden
under a fine of 1,000 marks or three months’
imprisonment. Recently WIGNEHIES was fined 100,000
frcs., and as the whole of this sum was not paid the
Germans inflicted punishment as follows: Several
inhabitants of WIGNEHIES were caught in the act of
disobeying by the gendarmes and were struck, and bitten
by the police dogs of the gendarmes because they refused
to denounce the sellers.... Brutal treatment
is due more to the gendarmes than to the soldiers.
About six weeks ago Marceau Horlet of WIGNEHIES was
found, on a search by the gendarmes, to have a piece
of meat in his possession. He was brutally beaten
by them and bitten by the police dogs because he refused
to say who had given it to him. In 1915, the
youth Remy Vallei of WIGNEHIES, age 15, was walking
in the street after 6-9 p.m., which was forbidden;
he was seen by two gendarmes and ran away. He
was straightway killed, receiving six revolver bullets
in his body.”

* * * *
*

“At PIGNICOURT during the Champagne offensive
the village was bombarded by the French, who were
attempting to destroy the railway lines and bridges.
The Commandant, by name Krama, of the Kdr, forced
men and youths, and even women, to fill up the holes
made by the bombardment during the action. A
German general passed and reprimanded them on the
ground that there was danger to the civilians; they
were withdrawn for the moment, but sent back as soon
as the general had left.”

* * * *
*

“As regards the Hispano-American revictualling,
it may be said with truth that without this the population
of Northern France would have died of hunger, for
the Germans considered themselves liberated from any
responsibility. During the first months of the
war before this Committee started, the Germans put
up posters saying that the Allies were trying to starve
Germany, who in turn was not obliged to feed the invaded
territory.... When informant (who is from st.
Quentin) left at the general evacuation of this
town, no requisition bonds were given for household
goods. As the inhabitants left, their furniture
was loaded on to motor lorries and taken to the station,
whence it was sent by special train to Germany.
This shows clearly that requisition bonds issued by
the Germans show only the small proportion of what
has been suffered by the inhabitants.... Informant
was the witness of the execution of French civilians
whose only fault was either to hide arms or pigeons:
several who had committed these infractions of requisitions
were shot, and the Germans announced the fact by poster
of a blood-red colour. In other cases the men
shot were British prisoners who had dressed in civil
clothes on the arrival of the Germans. Informant
had a long conversation with one of them before his
execution. He told informant how he had been unable

Page 55

to leave st. Quentin, viz., by the
28th August. Some passers-by offered to hide
him. It appears that, through his ignorance of
the French language, he was unaware that the Germans
threatened execution to all men found after a certain
date. He was discovered and condemned to death
for espionage. It is obvious, as the man himself
said, that one could not imagine a man acting as a
spy without knowing either the language of the country
or that of the enemy.”

* * * *
*

“Before the evacuation of the population the
Germans chose those who were to remain as civilian
workers, viz., 120 men from 15 to 60. On
the very day of the evacuation they kept back at the
station 27 others. These men are now at Cantin
or SOMAIN, where they are employed on the roads or
looking after munitions in the Arras group. The
others at DECHY and GUESNIN are in the Vimy group
and are making pill-boxes or railway lines. A
certain number of these workers refused to carry out
the work ordered, and as punishment during the summer
were tied to chairs and exposed bareheaded to the
full blaze of the sun. They were often threatened
to be shot.”

* * * *
*

“After the bombardment of Lille the Germans
entered ENNETIERES on the 12th October, 1914.
On the next Monday 200 Uhlans occupied the Commune,
and houses and haystacks were burned.... At LOMME
every one was forced to work: the Saxon Kdnt.
Schoper announced that all women who did not obey
within 24 hours would be interned: all the women
obeyed. They were employed in the making of osier-revetement
two metres high for the trenches. The men were
forced to put up barbed wire near Fort Denglas, two
kltrs. from the front. A few days after the evacuation
of ENNETIERES the Uhlans shot a youth, Jean Leclercq,
age 17, son of the gardener of Count D’Hespel,
simply because they had found a telephone wire in
the courtyard of the chateau.”

* * * *
*

“Informant, who has lost his right arm, was
nevertheless forced to work for the Germans, notably
to unload coal and to work on the roads. He had
with him males from 13 to 60. Having objected
because of his lost arm, he was threatened with imprisonment.
At LOMME squads of workers were given the work of
putting up barbed wire; women were forced to make
sand bags. In cases of refusal on either side
the Kdr. inflicted four or five weeks’ imprisonment,
to say nothing of blows with sticks inflicted by the
soldiers. In spring 1917 a number of men were
sent from LOMME to the BEAUVIN-Provins region
to work on defences.... Those who refused to
sign were threatened and struck with the butts of
rifles, and left in cellars sometimes filled with water
during bombardments. Several of them came back
seriously ill from privation.”

* * * *
*

“Young girls are separated from their mothers;
there are levies made at every moment. Sometimes
these young girls have barely a few hours before the
moment of departure.... Several young girls have
written to say that they are very unhappy and that
they sleep in camps amongst girls of low class and
condition.”

Page 56

* * * *
*

“For a long time past women have been forced
to work as road labourers. These work in the
quarries and transport wood cut down by the men in
the mountain forest. A number of women and young
girls have been removed from their families and sent
in the direction of Rheims and RETHEL, where
it is said (although this cannot be confirmed) that
they are employed in aerodromes.”

* * * *
*

These extracts should serve to explain the mental
and physical depression of the returning exiles.
They have been bullied out of the desire to live and
out of all possession of either their bodies or their
souls. They have been treated like cattle, and
as cattle they have come to regard themselves.
Lazaruses—­that’s what they are!
The unmerciful Boche, having killed and buried them,
drags them out from the tomb and compels them to go
through the antics of life. Le Gallienne’s
poem comes to my mind:

“Loud mockers in the angry street
Say Christ is crucified again—­
Twice pierced those gospel-bearing feet,
Twice broken that great heart in vain....”

That is all true at Evian. But when I see the
American men and girls, leaning over the Boche babies
in their cots and living their hearts into the hands
and feet of the spiritually maimed, the last two lines
of the poem become true for me:

“I hear, and to myself I say,
‘Why, Christ walks with me every
day.’”

The work of the American Red Cross at Evian is largely
devoted to children. It provides all the ambulance
transportation for the repatries, to and from the
station. American doctors and nurses do all the
examining of the children at the Casino. On an
average, four hundred pass through their hands daily.
The throat, nose, teeth, glands and skin of each child
are inspected. If the child is suspected or attacked
by any disease, it is immediately segregated and sent
to the American hospital. If the infection is
only local or necessitates further examination, the
child and its family are summoned to present themselves
at the American dispensary next day. Every precaution
is employed to prevent the spread of infection—­particularly
the infection of tuberculosis. Evian is the gateway
from Germany through which disease and death may be
carried to the furthest limits of France. Very
few of the repatries are really healthy. It would
be a wonder if they were after the privations through
which they have passed. All of them are weakened
in vitality and broken down in stamina. Many
of them have no homes to go to and have to be sent
to departments of the interior and the south.
If they were sent in an unhealthy condition, it would
mean the spread of epidemics.

Page 57

The Red Cross has a large children’s hospital
at Evian in the villas and buildings of the Hotel
Chatelet. This hospital deals with the contagious
cases. It has others, especially one at the Chateau
des Halles, thirty kilometers from Lyons, which take
the devitalised, convalescent and tubercular cases.
The Chateau des Halles is a splendidly built modern
building, arranged in an ideal way for hospital use.
It stands at the head of a valley, with an all day
sun exposure and large grounds. Close to the
Chateau are a number of small villages in which it
is possible to lodge the repatries in families.
This is an important part of the repatrie’s problem,
as after their many partings they fight fiercely against
any further separations. One of the chief reasons
for having the Convalescent Hospital out in the country
is that families can be quartered in the villages and
so kept together.

The pathetic hunger of these people for one another
after they have been so long divided, was illustrated
for me on my return journey to Paris. A man of
the tradesman class had been to Evian to meet his wife
and his boy of about eleven. They were among the
lucky ones, for they had a home to go to. He
was not prepossessing in appearance. He had a
weak face, lined with anxiety, broken teeth and limp
hair. His wife, as so often happens in French
marriages, had evidently been the manageress.
She was unbeautiful in rusty black; her clothes were
the ill-assorted make-shifts of the civilian who escapes
from Germany. Her eyes were shifty with the habit
of fear and sunken with the weariness of crying.
The boy was a bright little fellow, full of defiance
and anecdotes of his recent captors.

When I entered the carriage, they were sitting huddled
together—­the man in the middle, with an
arm about either of them. He kept pressing them
to him, kissing them by turn in a spasmodic unrestrained
fashion, as if he still feared that he might lose
them and could not convince himself of the happy truth
that they were once again together. The woman
did not respond to his embraces; she seemed indifferent
to him, indifferent to life, indifferent to any prospects.
The boy seemed fond of his father, but embarrassed
by his starved demonstrativeness.

I listened to their conversation. The man’s
talk was all of the future—­what splendid
things he would do for them. How, as long as
they lived, he would never waste a moment from their
sides. It appeared that he had been at Tours,
on a business trip when the war broke out, and could
not get back to Lille before the Germans arrived there.
For three and a half years he had lived in suspense,
while everything he loved had lain behind the German
lines. The woman contributed no suggestions to
his brilliant plans. She clung to him, but she
tried to divert his affection. When she spoke
it was of small domestic abuses: the exorbitant
prices she had had to pay for food; the way in which
the soldiery had stolen her pots and pans; the insolence

Page 58

she had experienced when she had lodged complaints
against the men before their officers. And the
boy—­he wanted to be a poilu. He kept
inventing revenges he would take in battle, if the
war lasted long enough for his class to be called
out. As darkness fell they ceased talking.
I began to realise that in three and a half years they
had lost contact. They were saying over and over
the things that had been said already; they were trying
to prevent themselves from acknowledging that they
had grown different and separate. The only bond
which held them as a family was their common loneliness
and fear that, if they did not hold together, their
intolerable loneliness would return. When the
light was hooded, the boy sank his hand against his
father’s shoulder; the woman nestled herself
in the fold of his arm, with her head turned away
from him, that he might not kiss her so often.
The man sat upright, his eyes wide open, watching them
sleeping with a kind of impotent despair. They
were together; and yet they were not together.
He had recovered them; nevertheless, he had not recovered
them. Those Boches, the devils, they had kept
something; they had only sent their bodies back.
All night long, whenever I woke up as the train halted,
the little man was still guarding them jealously as
a dog guards a bone, and staring morosely at the blank
wall of the future.

These were among the lucky ones; the boy and woman
had had a man to meet them. Somewhere in France
there was protection awaiting them and the shelter
of a house that was not charity. And yet ... all
night while they slept the man sat awake, facing up
to facts. These were among the lucky ones!
That is Evian; that is the tragedy and need of France
as you see it embodied in individuals.

* * * *
*

The total number of repatries and refugies now in
France is said to total a million and a half.
The repatries are the French civilians who were captured
by the Germans in their advance and have since been
sent back. The refugies are the French civilians
from the devastated areas, who have always remained
on the Allies’ side of the line. The refugies
are divided into two classes: refugies proper—­that
is fugitives from the front, who fled for the most
part at the time of the German invasion; and evacues—­those
who were sent out of the war zone by the military
authorities. Naturally a large percentage of this
million and a half have lost everything and, irrespective
of their former worldly position, now live with the
narrowest margin between themselves and starvation.
The French Government has treated them with generosity,
but in the midst of a war it has had little time to
devote to educating them into being self-supporting.
A great number of funds have been privately raised
for them in France; many separate organisations for
their relief have been started. The American Red
Cross is making this million and a half people its
special care, and to do so is co-operating directly

Page 59

with the French Government and with existing French
civilian projects. Its action is dictated by mercy
and admiration, but in results this policy is the most
far-seeing statesmanship. A million and a half
plundered people, if neglected and allowed to remain
downhearted, are likely to constitute a danger to
the morale of the bravest nation. Again, from
the point of view of after-war relations, to have
been generous towards those who have suffered is to
have won the heart of France. The caring for the
French repatriates and refugees is a definite contribution
to the winning of the war.

The French system of handling this human stream of
tragedy is to send the sick to local hospitals and
the exhausted to the maison de repos.
The comparatively healthy are allowed to be claimed
by friends; the utterly homeless are sent to some
prefecture remote from the front-line. The prefects
in turn distribute them among towns and villages,
lodging them in old barracks, casinos and any buildings
which war-conditions have made vacant. The adults
are allowed by the Government a franc and a half per
day, and the children seventy-five centimes.

The armies have drained France of her doctors since
the war; until the Americans came, the available medical
attention was wholly inadequate to the civilian population.
The American Red Cross is now establishing dispensaries
through the length and breadth of France. In
country districts, inaccessible to towns, it is inaugurating
automobile-dispensaries which make their rounds on
fixed and advertised days. In addition to this
it has started a child-welfare movement, the aim of
which is to build up the birth-rate and lower the
infant mortality by spreading the right kind of knowledge
among the women and girls.

The condition of the refugees and repatriates, thrust
into communities to which they came as paupers and
crowded into buildings which were never planned for
domestic purposes, has been far from enviable.
In September, 1917, the American Red Cross handed
over the solving of this problem to one of its experts
who had organised the aid given to San Francisco after
the earthquake, and who had also had charge of the
relief-work necessitated by the Ohio floods at Dayton.
Co-operating with the French, houses partially constructed
at the outbreak of war were now completed and furnished,
and approximately three thousand families were supplied
with homes and privacy. The start made proved
satisfactory. Supplies, running into millions
of francs, were requisitioned, and the plan for getting
the people out of public buildings into homes was
introduced to the officials of most of the departments
of France. Delegates were sent out by the Red
Cross to undertake the organisation of the work.
Money was apportioned for the supplying of destitute
families with furniture and the instruments of trade;
the object in view was not to pauperise them, but to
afford them the opportunity for becoming self-supporting.
Re-construction work in those devastated areas which
have been won back from the Boche was hurried forward
in order that the people who had been uprooted from
the soil might be returned to it and, in being returned
to their own particular soil, might recover their
place in life and their balance.

Page 60

I visited the devastated areas of the Pas-de-Calais,
Somme, Oise and Aisne and saw what is being accomplished.
This destroyed territory is roughly one hundred miles
long by thirty miles broad at its widest point.
In 1912 one-quarter of the wheat produced in France
and eighty-seven per cent. of the beet crop employed
in the national industry of sugar-making, were raised
in these departments of the north. The invasion
has diminished the national wheat production by more
than a half. It is obvious, then, that in getting
these districts once more under cultivation two birds
are being killed with one stone: the refugee
is being made a self-supporting person—­an
economic asset instead of a dead weight—­and
the tonnage problem is being solved. If more
food is grown behind the Western Front, grain-ships
can be released for transporting the munitions of
war from America.

The French Government had already made a start in
this undertaking before America came into the war.
As early as 1914 it voted three hundred million francs
and appointed a group of sous-prefets to see
to the dispensing of it. Little by little, as
the Huns have been driven back, the wealthier inhabitants,
whose money was safe in Paris banks, have returned
to these districts and opened oeuvres for the
poorer inhabitants. Many of them have lost their
sons and husbands; they find in their daily labour
for others worse off than themselves an escape from
life-long despair. Misfortune is a matter of comparison
and contrast. We are all of us unhappy or fortunate
according to our standards of selfishness and our
personal interpretation of our lot. These patriots
are bravely turning their experience of sorrow into
the materials of service. They can speak the
one and only word which makes a bond of sympathy between
the prosperous and the broken-hearted, “I, too,
have suffered.” I came across one such woman
in the neighbourhood of Villequier-au-Mont. She
was a woman of title and a royalist. Her estates
had been laid waste by the invasion and all her men-folk,
save her youngest son, were dead. Directly the
Hun withdrew last spring, she came back to the wilderness
which had been created and commenced to spend what
remained of her fortune upon helping her peasants.
These peasants had been the hewers of wood and drawers
of water for the Hun for three and a half years.
When his armies retreated, they took with them the
girls and the young men, leaving behind only the weaklings,
the children and the aged. Word came to the Red
Cross official of the district that her remaining
son had been killed in action; he was asked to break
the news to her. He went out to her ruined village
and found her sitting among a group of women in the
shell of a house, teaching them to make garments for
their families. She was pleased to see him; she
was in need of more materials. She had been intending
to make the journey to see him herself. She was
full of her work and enthusiastic over the valiance
of her people. He led her aside and told her.
She fell silent. Her face quivered—­that
was all. Then she completed her list of requirements
and went back to her women. In living to comfort
other people’s grief, she had no time to nurse
her own.

Page 61

These “oeuvres,” or groups of workers,
settle down in a shattered village or township.
The military authorities place the township in their
charge. They at once commence to get roofs on
to such houses as still have walls. They supply
farm-implements, poultry, rabbits, carts, seeds, plants,
etc. They import materials from Paris and
form sewing classes for the women and girls. They
encourage the trades-people to re-start their shops
and lend them the necessary initial capital.
What is perhaps most valuable, they lure the terror-stricken
population out of their caves and dug-outs, and set
them an example of hope and courage. Some of the
best pioneer work of this sort has been done by the
English Society of Friends who now, together with
the Friends of the United States, have become a part
of the Bureau of the Department of Civil Affairs of
the American Red Cross.

The American Red Cross works through the “oeuvres”
which it found already operating in the devastated
area; it places its financial backing at their disposal,
its means of motor transport and its personnel; it
grafts on other “oeuvres,” operating in
newly taken over villages, in which Americans, French
and English work side by side for the common welfare;
at strategic points behind the lines it has established
a chain of relief warehouses, fully equipped with
motor-lorries and cars. These warehouses furnish
everything that an agricultural people starting life
afresh can require—­food, clothes, blankets,
beds, mattresses, stoves, kitchen utensils, reapers,
binders, mowing-machines, threshing-machines, garden-tools,
soap, tooth brushes, etc. If you can conceive
of yourself as having been a prosperous farmer and
waking up one morning broken in heart and dirty in
person, with your barns, live-stock, daughters, sons,
everything gone—­not a penny left in the
world—­you can imagine your necessities,
and then form some picture of the fore-thought that
goes to the running of a Red Cross warehouse.

But the poverty of these people is not the worst condition
that the Red Cross workers have to tackle; money can
always replace money. Hope, trust, affection
and a genial belief in the world’s goodness
cannot be transplanted into another man’s heart
in exchange for bitterness by even the most lavish
giver. I can think of no modern parallel for
their blank despair; the only eloquence which approximately
expresses it is that of Job, centuries old, “Why
is light given to a man whose way is hid and whom
God hath hedged in? My sighing cometh before
I eat. My roarings are poured out like waters.
My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ into the
voice of them that weep. I was not in safety,
neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble
came.”

This hell which the Hun has created, beggars any description
of Dante.[1] It is still more appalling to remember
that the external hell which one sees, does not represent
one tithe of the dreariness which lies hidden behind
the eyes of the inhabitants. To imagine amid
such scenes is to paralyse compassion with agony.
The craving, never far from one’s thoughts,
is the age-old desire, “O that one might plead
with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour!”

Page 62

[Footnote 1: Since this was written and just
as I am returning to the front, the Hun has set to
work to create this hell for the second time.
Most of the places referred to below are once more
within the enemy country and all the mercy of the
American Red Cross has been wiped out.]

I started out on my trip in a staff-car from a city
well behind the lines. In the first half hour
of the journey the country was green and pleasant.
We passed some cavalry officers galloping across a
brown field; birds were battling against a flurrying
wind; high overhead an aeroplane sailed serenely.
There was a sense of life, motion and exhilaration
abroad, but only for the first half hour of our journey.
Then momentarily a depression grew up about us.
Fields and trees were becoming dead, as if a swarm
of locusts had eaten their way across them. Greenness
was vanishing. Houses were becoming untenanted;
there were holes in the walls of many of them, through
which one gained glimpses of the sky. Here, by
the road-side, we passed a cluster of insignificant
graves. Then, almost without warning, the barbed-wire
entanglements commenced, and the miles and miles of
abandoned trenches. This, not a year ago from
the day on which I write, was the Hun’s country.
Last spring, in an attempt to straighten his line,
he retreated from it. Our offensives on the Somme
had converted his Front into a dangerous salient.

We are slowing down; the road is getting water-logged
and full of holes. The skull of a dead town grows
up on the horizon. Even at this distance the
light behind empty windows glares malevolently like
the nothingness in vacant sockets. A horror is
over everything. The horror is not so much due
to the destruction as to the total absence of any
signs of life. One man creeping through the landscape
would make it seem more kindly. I have been in
desolated towns often, but there were always the faces
of our cheery Tommies to smile out from cellars and
gaps in the walls. From here life is banished
utterly. The battle-line has retired eastward;
one can hear the faint rumble of the guns at times.
No civilian has come to re-inhabit this unhallowed
spot.

We enter what were once its streets. They are
nothing now but craters with boards across them.
On either side the trees lie flat along the ground,
sawn through within a foot of the roots. What
landmarks remain are the blackened walls of houses,
cracked and crashed in by falling roofs. The
entire place must have been given over to explosion
and incendiarism before the Huns departed. One
stands in awe of such completeness of savagery; one
begins to understand what is meant by the term “frightfulness.”
As far as eye can reach there is nothing to be seen
but decayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth,
covered with a green slime where water has accumulated.
This is not the unavoidable ruin of shell-fire.
No battle was fought here. The demolition was
the wanton spite of an enemy who, because he could

Page 63

not hold the place, was determined to leave nothing
serviceable behind. With such masterly thoroughness
has he done his work that the spot can never be re-peopled.
The surrounding fields are too poisoned and churned
up for cultivation. The French Government plans
to plant a forest; it is all that can be done.
As years go by, the kindliness of Nature may cause
her to forget and cover up the scars of hatred with
greenness. Then, perhaps, peasant lovers will
wander here and refashion their dreams of a chivalrous
world. Our generation will be dead by that time;
throughout our lives this memorial to “frightfulness”
will remain.

We have left the town and are out in the open country.
It is clean and unharried. Man can murder orchards
and habitations—­the things which man plants
and makes; he finds it more difficult to strangle
the primal gifts of Nature. All along by the roadside
the cement telegraph-posts have been broken off short;
some of them lie flat along the ground, others hang
limply in the bent shape of hairpins. Very often
we have to make a detour where a steel bridge has been
blown up; we cross the gulley over an improvised affair
of struts and planks, and so come back into the main
roadway. Every now and then we pass steam-tractors
at work, ploughing huge fields into regular furrows.
The French Department of Agriculture purchased in America
nineteen teams of ten tractors apiece in the autumn
of last year. The American Red Cross has supplied
others. The fields of this district are unfenced—­the
farmers used to live together in villages; so the
work is made easy. It is possible to throw a number
of holdings together and to apply to France the same
wholesale mechanical means of wheat-growing that are
employed on the prairies of Canada. All the cattle
and horses have been carried off into Germany.
All the farm-implements have been destroyed—­and
destroyed with a surprising ingenuity. The same
parts were destroyed in each instrument, so that an
entire instrument could not be reconstructed.
The farms could not have been brought under cultivation
this year, had not the Government and the Red Cross
lent their assistance.

We are approaching Noyon, the birthplace of Calvin.
This is one of the few towns the Hun spared in his
retreat; he spared it not out of a belated altruism,
but purely to serve his own convenience. There
were some of the French civilians who weren’t
worth transporting to Germany. They would be
too weak, or too old, or too young to earn their keep
when he got them there. These he sorted out, irrespective
of their family ties, and herded from the surrounding
districts into Noyon. They were crowded into
the houses and ordered under pain of death not to
come out until they were given permission. They
were further ordered to shutter all their windows
and not to look out.

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As an old lady, who narrated the story, said, “We
had no idea, Monsieur, what was to happen. Les
Boches had been with us for nearly three years;
it never entered our heads that they were leaving.
When they took the last of our young girls from us
and all who were strong among our men, it was something
that they had done so often and so often. When
they made us hide in our houses, we thought it was
only to prevent a disturbance. It is not easy
to see your boys and girls marched away into slavery—­Monsieur
will understand that. Sometimes, on former occasions,
the mothers had attacked les Boches and the
young girls had become hysterical; we thought that
it was to avoid such scenes that we were shut up in
our houses. When darkness fell, we sat in our
rooms without any lights, for they also were forbidden.
All night long through our streets we heard the endless
tramping of battalions, the clattering wheels of guns
and limbers, the sharp orders, the halting and the
marching taken up afresh. Towards dawn everything
grew silent. At first it would be broken occasionally
by the hurried trot of cavalry or the shuffling footsteps
of a straggler. Then it grew into the absolute
silence of death. It was nerve-racking and terrible.
One could almost hear the breathing of the listening
people in all the other houses. I do not know
how time went or what was the hour. I could endure
the suspense no longer. They might kill me, but
... Ah well, at my age after nearly three years
with ’les Boches,’ killing is a little
matter! I crept down the passage and drew back
the bolts. I was very gentle; a sentry might hear
me. I opened the door just a crack. I expected
to hear a rifle-shot ring out, but nothing happened.
I opened it wider, and saw that the street was empty
and that it was broad daylight. Then I waited—­I
do not know how long I waited. I crouched against
the wall, huddled with terror. All this took
much longer in the doing than in the telling.
At last I could bear myself no longer. I tiptoed
out on to the pavement—­and, Monsieur will
believe me, I expected to drop dead. But no one
disturbed me. Then I heard a rustling. Doors
everywhere were opening stealthily, ah, so stealthily!
Some one else tiptoed out, and some one else, and some
one else. We stood there staring, aghast at our
daring. Suddenly we realised what had happened.
The brutes had gone. We were free. It was
indescribable, what followed—­we ran together,
weeping and embracing. At first we wept for gladness;
soon we wept for sorrow. Our youth had departed;
we were all old women or very ancient men. Two
hours later our poilus came, like a blue-grey wave
of laughter, fighting their way through the burning
country that those swine had left in a sea of smoke
and flames.”

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And so that was why the Hun spared Noyon. But
if he spared Noyon, he spared little else.[2] Every
village between here and the present front line has
been levelled; every fruit-tree cut down. The
wilful wickedness and pettiness of the crime stir
one’s heart to pity and his soul to white-hot
anger. The people who did this must make payment
in more than money; to settle such a debt blood is
required. American soldiers who came to Europe
to do a job and with no decided detestation of the
Hun, are being taught by such landscapes. They
know now why they came. The wounds of France
are educating them.

[Footnote 2: Goodness knows where the “present
Front-line” may be by the time this book is
published. I visited Noyon in February, 1918,
just before the big Hun offensive commenced.]

There has been a scheme proposed in America under
which certain individual cities and towns in the States
shall make themselves responsible for the re-building
of certain individual cities and towns in the devastated
areas. The scheme is noble; it has only one drawback,
namely that it specialises effort and tends to ignore
the immensity of the problem as a whole. I visited
one of these towns—­it is a town for which
Philadelphia has made itself responsible. I wish
the people of Philadelphia might get a glimpse of the
task they have undertaken. There is a church-spire
still standing; that is about all. The rest is
a pile of bricks. In the midst of this havoc some
Philadelphia ladies are living, one of whom is a nurse.
They run a dispensary for the people who keep house
for the most part in cellars and holes in the ground.
A doctor visits them to hold a clinic ever so often.
They have a little warehouse, in which they keep the
necessities for immediate relief work. They have
a rest hut for soldiers. They employ whatever
civilian labour they can hire for the roofing of some
of the least damaged cottages; for this temporary
reconstruction they provide the materials. When
I was there, the place was well within range of enemy
shell-fire. The approach had to be made by way
of camouflaged roads. The sole anxiety of these
brave women was that on account of their nearness
to the front-line, the military might compel them
to move back. In order to safeguard themselves
against this and to create a good impression, they
were making a strong point of entertaining whatever
officers were billeted in this vicinity. Their
effort to remain in this rural Gomorrah was as courageous
as it was pathetic. “The people need us,”
they said, and then, “you don’t think
we’ll be moved back, do you?” I thought
they would, and I didn’t think that the grateful
officers would be able to prevent it—­they
were subalterns and captains for the most part.
“But we once had a major to tea,” they
said. “A major!” I exclaimed, trying
to look impressed, “Oh well, that makes a difference!”

Page 66

There was one unit I wished especially to visit; it
was a unit consisting entirely of women, sent over
and financed by a women’s college. When
I was in America last October and heard that they were
starting, I made up my mind that they were doomed to
disappointment. I pictured the battlefield of
the Somme as I had last seen it—­a sea of
mud stretching for miles, furrowed by the troughs of
battered trenches, pitted every yard with shell-holes
and smeared over with the wreckage of what once were
human bodies. I could not imagine what useful
purpose women could serve amid such surroundings.
It seemed to me indecent that they should be allowed
to go there. They were going to do reconstruction,
I was told. Reconstruction! you can’t reconstruct
towns and villages the very foundations of which have
been buried. There is a Bible phrase which expresses
such annihilation, “The place thereof shall
know it no more.” Yes, only the names remain
in one’s memory—­the very sites have
been covered up and the contours of the landscape
re-dug with high explosives. It took millions
of pounds to work this havoc. Men tunnelled under-ground
and sprung mines without warning. They climbed
like birds of prey, into the heavens to hurl death
from the clouds. They lined up their guns, tier
upon tier, almost axle to axle in places, and at a
given sign rained a deluge of corruption on a country
miles in front, which they could not even discern.
The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled
themselves up into mounds of silence. Nations
far away toiled day and night in factories—­and
all that they might achieve this repellant desolation.
The innocence of the project made one smile—­a
handful of women sailing from America to reconstruct!
To reconstruct will take ten times more effort than
was required to destroy. More than eight hundred
years ago William the Norman burnt his way through
the North Country to Chester. Yorkshire has not
yet recovered; it is still a wind-swept moorland.
This women’s college in America hoped to repair
in our lifetime a ruin a million times more terrible.
Their courage was depressing, it so exceeded the possible.
They might love one village back to life, but....
That is exactly what they are doing.

I arrived at Grecourt on an afternoon in January.
It is here that the women of the Smith College Unit
have taken up their tenancy. We had extraordinary
difficulty in finding the place. The surrounding
country had been blasted and scorched by fire.
There was no one left of whom we could enquire.
Everything had perished. Barns, houses, everything
habitable had been blown up by the departing Hun.
As a study in the painstaking completion of a purpose
the scenes through which we passed almost called for
admiration. Berlin had ordered her armies to
destroy everything before withdrawing; they had obeyed
with a loving thoroughness. The world has never
seen such past masters in the art of demolition.
Ever since they invaded Belgium, their hand has been

Page 67

improving. In the neighbourhood of Grecourt they
have equalled, if not surpassed, their own best efforts.
I would suggest to the Kaiser that this manly performance
calls for a distribution of iron crosses. It is
true that his armies were beaten and retiring; but
does not that fact rather enhance their valour?
They were retiring, yet there were those who were
brave enough to delay their departure till they had
achieved this final victory over old women and children
to the lasting honour of their country. Such
heroes are worthy to stand beside the sinkers of the
Lusitania. It is not just that they should
go unrecorded.

In the midst of this hell I came across a tumbled
chateau. Its roof, its windows, its stairways
were gone; only the crumbling shell of its former
happiness was left standing. A high wall ran about
its grounds. The place must have been pleasant
with flower-gardens once. There was an impressive
entrance of wrought-iron, a porter’s lodge and
a broad driveway. At the back I found rows of
little wood-huts. There was a fragrance of log-fires
burning. I was glad of that, for I had heard
of the starving cold these women had had to endure
through the first winter months of their tenure.
On tapping at a door, I found the entire colony assembled.
It was tea-time and Sunday. Ten out of the seventeen
who form the colony were present. A box-stove,
such as we use in our pioneer shacks in Canada, was
throwing out a glow of cheeriness. Candles had
been lighted. Little knicknacks of feminine taste
had been hung here and there to disguise the bareness
of the walls. A bed, in one corner, was carefully
disguised as a couch. Save for the fact that
there was no glass in the window—­glass
being unobtainable in France at present—­one
might easily have persuaded himself that he was back
in America in the room of a girl-undergraduate.

The method of my greeting furthered this illusion.
Americans, both men and women, have an extraordinary
self-poise, a gift for remaining normal in the most
abnormal surroundings. They refuse to allow themselves
to be surprised by any upheaval of circumstances.
“I should worry,” they seem to be saying,
and press straight on with the job in hand. There
was one small touch which made the environment seem
even more friendly and unexceptional. One of the
girls, on being introduced, promptly read to me a
letter which she had just received from my sister
in America. It made this oasis in an encircling
wilderness seem very much a part of a neighbourly world.
This girl is an example of the varied experiences
which have trained American women into becoming the
nursemaids of the French peasantry.

Page 68

She was visiting relations in Liege when the war broke
out. On the Sunday she went for a walk on the
embattlements and was turned back. Baulked in
this direction, she strolled out towards the country
and found men digging trenches. That was the
first she knew that war was rumoured. On the
Tuesday, two days later, Hun shells were detonating
on the house-tops. She was held prisoner in Liege
for some months after the Forts had fallen and saw
more than all the crimes against humanity that the
Bryce Report has recorded. At last she disguised
herself and contrived her escape into Holland.
From there she worked her way back to America and
now she is at Grecourt, starting shops in the villages,
educating the children, and behaving generally as if
to respond to the “Follow thou me” of
the New Testament was an entirely unheroic proceeding
for a woman.

And what are these women doing at Grecourt? To
condense their purpose into a phrase, I should say
that by their example they are bringing sanity back
into the lives of the French peasants. That is
what the American Fund for French Wounded is doing
at Blerancourt, what all these reconstruction units
are doing in the devastated areas, and what the American
Red Cross is doing on a much larger scale for the whole
of France. At Grecourt they have a dispensary
and render medical aid. If the cases are grave,
they are sent to the American Hospital at Nesle.
They hunt out the former tradespeople among the refugees
and encourage them to re-start their shops, lending
them the money for the purpose. If the men are
captives in Germany, then their wives are helped to
carry on the business in their absence and for their
sakes. Groups of mothers are brought together
and set to work on making clothes for themselves and
their children. Schools are opened so that the
children may be more carefully supervised. Two
of the girls at Grecourt have learnt to plough, and
are instructing the peasant women. Cows are kept
and a dairy has been started to provide the under-nourished
babies of the district. An automobile-dispensary
is sent out from the hospital at Nesle to visit the
remoter districts. It has a seat along one side
for the patient and the nurse. Over the seat
is a rack for medicine and instruments. On the
opposite side is a rack for splints and surgical dressings.
On the floor of the car a shower-bath is arranged,
which is so compact that it can be carried into the
house where the water is to be heated. The water
is put into a tub on a wooden base; while the doctor
manipulates the pump for the shower, the nurse does
the scrubbing. Most of the diseases among the
children are due to dirt; the importance of keeping
clean, which such colonies as that at Grecourt are
impressing on all the people whom they serve, is doing
much to improve the general state of health. In
this direction, as in so many others, the most valuable
contribution that they are making to their districts
is not material and financial, but mental—­the

Page 69

contribution of example and suggestion. Seventeen
women cannot re-build in a day an external civilisation
which has been blotted out by the savagery of a nation;
but they can and they are re-building the souls of
the human derelicts who have survived the savagery.
This war is going to be won not by the combination
of nations which has most men and guns, but by the
side which possesses the highest spiritual qualities.
The same is true of the countries which will wipe
out the effects of war most quickly when the war is
ended. The first countries to recover will be
those which fight on in a new way, after peace has
been signed, for the same ideals for which they have
shed their blood. The sight of these American
women, living helpfully and voluntarily for the sake
of others among hideous surroundings, is a perpetual
reminder to the dispirited refugees that, whatever
else is lost, valiance and loyalty still survive.

From Grecourt I went farther afield to Croix, Y and
Matigny. Here a young architect is in charge
of the reconstruction. No attempt is being made
at present to re-build the farms entirely. Labour
is difficult to obtain—­it is all required
for military purposes. The same applies to materials.
Patching is the best that can be done. Just to
get a roof over one corner of a ruin is as much as
can be hoped for. Until that is done the people
have to live in cellars, in shell-holes, in verminous
dug-outs like beasts of prey or savages. Their
position is far more deplorable than that of Indians,
for they once knew the comforts of civilisation.
For instance, I visited a farmer who before the war
was a millionaire in French money. Many of the
farmers of this district were; their acreages were
large even by prairie standards. The American
Red Cross has managed to reconstruct one room for
him in a pile of debris which was once a spacious house.
There he lives with his old wife, who, during the Hun
occupation, became nearly blind and almost completely
paralytic. His sons and daughters have been swept
beyond his knowledge by the departing armies.
Before the Huns left, he had to stand by and watch
them uselessly lay waste his home and possessions.
His trees are cut down. His barns are laid flat.
His cattle are behind the German lines. At the
age of seventy, he is starting all afresh and working
harder than ever he did in his life. The young
architect of the Red Cross visits him often.
They sit in the little room of nights, erecting barns
and houses more splendid than those that have vanished,
but all in the green quiet of the untested future.
They shall be standing by the time the captive sons
come back. It is a game at which they play for
the sake of the blinded mother; she listens smilingly,
nodding her old head, her frail hands folded in her
lap.

Page 70

These pictures which I have painted are typical of
some of the things that the American Red Cross is
doing. They are isolated examples, which by no
means cover all its work. There are the rolling
canteens which it has instituted, which follow the
French armies. There are the rest houses it has
built on the French line of communications for poilus
who are going on leave or returning. There is
the farm for the mutilated, where they are taught
to be specialists in certain branches of agriculture,
despite their physical curtailments. There is
the great campaign against tuberculosis which it is
waging. There are its well-conceived warehouses,
stored with medical supplies and military and relief
necessities, spreading in a great net-work of usefulness
and connected by ambulance transport throughout the
whole of the stricken part of France. There are
its hospitals, both military and civil. There
is the “Lighthouse” for men wounded in
battle, founded by Miss Holt in Paris.

I visited this Lighthouse; it is a place infinitely
brave and pathetic. Most of the men were picked
heroes at the war; they wear their decorations in
proof of it. They are greater heroes than ever
now. Nothing has more deeply moved me than my
few hours among those sightless eyes. In many
cases the faces are hideously marred, the eyelids
being quite grown together. In several cases besides
the eyes, the arms or legs have gone. I have
talked and written a good deal about the courage which
this war has inspired in ordinary men; but the courage
of these blinded men, who once were ordinary, leaves
me silent and appalled. They are happy—­how
and why I cannot understand. Most of them have
been taught at the Lighthouse how to overcome their
disability and are earning their living as weavers,
stenographers, potters, munition-workers. Quite
a number of them have families to support. The
only complaint that is made against them by their
brother-workmen is that they are too rapid; they set
too strenuous a pace for the men with eyes. It
is a fact that in all trades where sensitiveness of
touch is an asset, blindness has increased their efficiency.
This is peculiarly so at the Sevres pottery-works where
I saw them making the moulds for retorts. A soldier,
who was teaching a seeing person Braille, explained
his own quickness of perception when he exclaimed,
“Ah, madame, it is your eyes which prevent you
from seeing!”

I heard some of the stories of the men. There
was a captain who, after he had been wounded and while
there was yet time to save his sight, insisted on
being taken to his General that he might inform him
about a German mine. When his mission was completed,
his chance of seeing was forever ended.

There was a lieutenant who was blinded in a raid and
left for dead out in No Man’s Land. Just
before he became unconscious, he placed two lumps
of earth in line in the direction which led back to
his own trenches. He knew the direction by the
sound of the retreating footsteps. Whenever he
came to himself he groped his way a little nearer
to France and before he fainted again, registered the
direction with two more lumps of earth placed in line.
It took him a day to crawl back.

Page 71

There was another man who illustrated in a finer way
that saying, “It is your eyes which prevent
you from seeing.” This man before the war
was a village-priest, and no credit to his calling.
He had a sister who had spent her youth for him and
worshipped him beyond everything in the world.
He took her adoration brutally for granted. At
the outbreak of hostilities he joined the army, serving
bravely in the ranks till he was hopelessly blinded.
Having always been a thoroughly selfish man, his privation
drove him nearly to madness. He had always used
the world; now for the first time he had been used
by it. His viciousness broke out in blasphemy;
he hated both God and man. He made no distinction
between people in the mass and the people who tried
to help him. His whole desire was to inflict
as much pain as he himself suffered. When his
sister came to visit him, he employed every ingenuity
of word and gesture to cause her agony. Do what
she would, he refused to allow her love either to
reach or comfort him. She was only a simple peasant
woman. In her grief and loneliness she thought
matters out and arrived at what seemed to her a practical
solution. On her next visit to the hospital she
asked to see the doctor. She was taken to him
and made her request. “I love my brother,”
she said; “I have always given him everything.
He has lost his eyes and he cannot endure it.
Because I love him, I could bear it better. I
have been thinking, and I am sure it is possible:
I want you to remove my eyes and to put them into
his empty sockets.”

When the priest was told of her offer, he laughed
derisively at her for a fool. Then the reason
she had given for her intended sacrifice was told
to him, “Because I love him, I could bear it
better.” He fell silent. All that
day he refused food; in the eternal darkness, muffled
by his bandages, he was arriving at the truth:
she had been willing to suffer what he was now suffering,
because she loved him. The hand of love would
have made the burden bearable and, if for her, why
not for himself? At last, after years of refusal,
the simplicity of her tenderness reached and touched
him. Presently he was discharged from hospital
and taken in hand by the teachers of the blind, who
taught him to play the organ. One day his sister
came and led him back to his village-parish.
Before the war, by his example, he was a danger to
God and man; now he sets a very human example of sainthood,
labouring without ceasing for others more fortunate
than himself. He has increased his efficiency
for service by his blindness. Of him it is absolutely
true that it was his eyes that prevented him from
seeing—­from seeing the splendour that lay
hidden in himself, no less than in his fellow creatures.

So far I have sketched in the main what the war of
compassion is doing for the repatries—­the
captured French civilians sent back from Germany—­and
for the refugees of the devastated areas, who have
either returned to their ruined farms and villages
or were abandoned as useless when the Hun retired.
To complete the picture it remains to describe what
is being done for the civilian population which has
always lived in the battle area of the French armies.

Page 72

The question may be asked why civilians have been
allowed to live here. Curiously enough it is
due to the extraordinary humanity of the French Government
which makes allowances for the almost religious attachment
of the peasant to his tiny plot of land; it is an
attachment which is as instinctive and fiercely jealous
as that of a cat for her young. He will endure
shelling, gassing and all the horrors that scientific
invention has produced; he will see his cottage and
his barns shattered by bombs and siege-guns, but he
will not leave the fields that he has tilled and toiled
over, unless he is driven out at the point of the
bayonet. I have been told, though I have never
seen it, that behind quiet parts of the line, French
peasants will gather in their harvest actually in full
sight of the Hun. Shells may be falling, but
they go stolidly on with their work. There is
another reason for this leniency of the Government:
they have enough refugees on their hands already and
are not going in search of further trouble, until
the trouble is forced upon them by circumstances.

As may be imagined, these people live under physical
conditions that are terrible. They consist for
the most part of women and children; the women are
over-worked and the children are neglected. Skin
diseases and vermin abound. Clothes are negligible.
Washing is a forgotten luxury. Much havoc is
wrought by asphyxiating gases which drift across the
front-line into the back-country. To the adults
are issued protective masks like those that the soldiers
wear, but the children do not know how to use them.
Many of them are orphans, and live like little animals
on roots and offal; for shelter they seek holes in
the ground. The American Red Cross is specialising
on its efforts to reclaim these children, realising
that whatever happens to the adults, the children
are the hope of the world.

The part of the Front to which I went to study this
work was made famous in 1914 by the disembowellings,
shootings and unspeakable indecencies that were perpetrated
there. Near by is the little village in which
Sister Julie risked her life by refusing to allow her
wounded to be butchered. She wears the Legion
of Honour now. In the same neighbourhood there
lives a Mayor who, after having seen his young wife
murdered, protected her murderers from the lynch-law
of the mob when next day the town was recaptured.
In the same district there is a meadow where fifteen
old men were done to death, while a Hun officer sat
under an oak-tree, drinking mocking toasts to the victims
of each new execution.

The influence of more than three years of warfare
has not been elevating, as far as these peasants are
concerned. As early as July, a little over a
month from its arrival in France, an S.O.S. was sent
out by the Prefet of the department, begging the American
Red Cross to come and help. In addition to the
refugees of old standing, 350 children had been suddenly
put into his care. He had nothing but a temporary

Page 73

shelter for them and his need for assistance was acute.
Within a few hours the Red Cross had despatched eight
workers—­a doctor, nurse, bacteriologist,
an administrative director and two women to take charge
of the bedding, food and clothing. A camionette
loaded with condensed milk and other relief necessities
was sent by road. On the arrival of the party,
they found the children herded together in old barracks,
dirty and unfurnished, with no sanitary appliances
whatsoever. The sick were crowded together with
the well. Of the 350 children, twenty-one were
under one year of age, and the rest between one and
eight years. The reason for this sudden crisis
was that the Huns were bombing the villages behind
the lines with asphyxiating gas. The military
authorities had therefore withdrawn all children who
were too young to adjust their masks themselves, at
the same time urging their mothers to carry on the
patriotic duty of gathering in the harvest. It
was the machinery of mercy which had been built up
in six months about this nucleus of eight persons that
I set out to visit.

The roads were crowded with the crack troops of France—­the
Foreign Legion, the Tailleurs, the Moroccans—­all
marching in one direction, eastward to the trenches.
There were rumours of something immense about to happen—­no
one knew quite what. Were we going to put on a
new offensive or were we going to resist one?
Many answers were given: they were all guesswork.
Meanwhile, our progress was slow; we were continually
halting to let brigades of artillery and regiments
of infantry pour into the main artery of traffic from
lanes and side-roads. When we had backed our
car into hedges to give them room to pass, we watched
the sea of faces. They were stern and yet laughing,
elated and yet childish, eloquent of the love of living
and yet familiar with their old friend, Death.
They knew that something big was to be demanded of
them; before the demand had been made, they had determined
to give to the ultimate of their strength. There
was a spiritual resolution about their faces which
made all their expressions one—­the uplifted
expression of the unconquered soul of France.
That expression blotted out their racial differences.
It did not matter that they were Arabs, Negroes, Normans,
Parisians; they owned to one nationality—­the
nationality of martyrdom—­and they marched
with a single purpose, that freedom might be restored
to the world.

When we reached the city to which we journeyed, night
had fallen. There was something sinister about
our entry; we were veiled in fog, and crept through
the gate and beneath the ramparts with extinguished
head lights. Scarcely any one was abroad.
Those whom we passed, loomed out of the mist in silence,
passed stealthily and vanished.

Page 74

This city is among the most beautiful in France; until
recently, although within range of the Hun artillery,
it had been left undisturbed. In return the French
had spared an equally beautiful city on the other
side of the line. This clemency, shown towards
two gems of architecture, was the result of one of
those silent bargains that are arranged in the language
of the guns. But the bargain had been broken
by the time I arrived. Bombing planes had been
over; the Allied planes had retaliated. Houses,
emptied like cart-loads of bricks into the street,
were significant of the ruin that was pending.
Any moment the orchestra of destruction might break
into its overture. Without cessation one could
hear a distant booming. The fiddlers of death
were tuning up.

Early next morning I went to see the Prefet.
He is an old man, whose courage has made him honoured
wherever the French tongue is spoken. Others
have thought of their own safety and withdrawn into
the interior. Never from the start has his sense
of duty wavered. Night and day he has laboured
incessantly for the refugees, whom he refers to always
as “my suffering people.” He kept
me waiting for some time. Directly I entered
he volunteered the explanation: he had just received
word from the military authorities that the whole of
his civil population must be immediately evacuated.
To evacuate a civil population means to tear it up
and transplant it root and branch, with no more of
its possession than can be carried as hand-baggage.
Some 75,000 people would be made homeless directly
the Prefet published the order.

It was a dramatic moment, full of tragedy. I
glanced out into the square filled with wintry sunlight.
I took note of the big gold gates and the monuments.
I watched the citizens halting here and there to chat,
or going about their errands with a quiet confidence.
All this was to be shattered; it had been decided.
The same thing was to happen here as had happened
at Ypres. The bargain was off. The enemy
city, the other side of the line, was to be shelled;
this city had to take the consequences. The bargain
was off not only as far as the city was concerned,
but also as regards its inhabitants’ happiness.
They had homes to-day; they would be fugitives to-morrow.
Then I looked at the old Prefet, who had to break
the news to them. He was sitting at his table
in his uniform of office, supporting his head in his
tired hands.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I have called on the Croix Rouge Americaine
to help me,” he said. “They have
helped me before; they will help me again. These
Americans—­I have never been to America—­but
they are my friends. Since they came, they have
looked after my babies. Their doctors and nurses
have worked day and night for my suffering people.
They are silent; but they do things. There is
love in their hands.”

Page 75

While I was still with him the Red Cross officials
arrived. They had already wired to Paris.
Their lorries and ambulances were converging from
all points to meet the emergency. They undertook
at once to place all their transport facilities at
his disposal. They had started their arrangements
for the handling of the children. Extra personnel
were being rushed to the spot. There was one
unit already in the city. They had hoped to go
nearer to the Front, but on arriving had learnt that
their permission had been cancelled. It was a
bit of luck. They could set to work at once.

I knew this unit and went out to find it. It
was composed of American society girls, who had been
protected all their lives from ugliness. They
had sailed from New York with the vaguest ideas of
the war conditions they would encounter; they believed
that they were needed to do a nurse-maid’s job
for France. Their original purpose was to found
a creche for the babies of women munition-workers.
When they got to Paris they found that such institutions
were not wanted. They at once changed their programme,
and asked to be allowed to take their creche into
the army zone and convert it into a hospital for refugee
children. There were interminable delays due to
passport formalities—­the delays dragged
on for three months. During those three months
they were called on for no sacrifice; they lived just
as comfortably as they had done in New York and, consequently,
grew disgusted. They had sailed for France prepared
to give something that they had never given before,
and France did not seem to want it. At last their
passports came; without taking any chances, they got
out of Paris and started for the Front. Their
haste was well-timed; no sooner had they departed
than a message arrived, cancelling their permissions.
They had reached the doomed city in which I was at
present, two days before its sentence was pronounced.
Within four hours of their arrival they had had their
first experience of being bombed. Their intention
had been to open their hospital in a town still nearer
to the front-line. The hospital was prepared and
waiting for them. But in the last few days the
military situation had changed. A hospital so
near the trenches stood a good chance of being destroyed
by shell-fire; so once again the unit was held up.
It volunteered to abandon its idea of running the
hospital for children; it would run it as a first
aid hospital for the armies. The offer was refused.
These girls, whose gravest interest a year ago had
been the season’s dances and the latest play,
were determined to experience the thrill of sacrifice.
So here they were in the doomed city, as the Red Cross
officials said, “by luck”—­the
very place where they were most needed.

Page 76

When I visited them, after leaving the Prefet’s,
they had not yet heard that they were to be allowed
to stay. They had heard nothing of the city’s
sentence or of the evacuation of the civil population.
All they knew was that the hospital, which had been
appointed with their money, was only a few kilometres
away and that they were forbidden even to see it.
They were gloomy with the fear that within a handful
of days they would be again walking the boulevards
of Paris. When the news was broken to them of
the part they were to play, the full significance
of it did not dawn on them at once. “But
we don’t want anything easy,” they complained;
“this isn’t the Front.” “It
will be soon,” the official told them.
When they heard that they cheered up; then their share
in the drama was explained. In all probability
the city would soon be under constant shell-fire.
Refugees would be pouring back from the forward country.
The people of the city itself had to be helped to
escape before the bombardment commenced. They
would have to stay there taking care of the children,
packing them into lorries, driving ambulances, rendering
first aid, taking the wounded and decrepit out of
danger and always returning to it again themselves.
As the certainty of the risk and service was impressed
on them their faces brightened. Risk and service,
that was what they most desired; they were girls,
but they hungered to play a soldier’s part.
They had only dreamt of serving when they had sailed
from New York. Those three months of waiting
had stung their pride. It was in Paris that the
dream of risk had commenced. They would make France
want them. Their chance had come.

When I came out into the streets again the word was
spreading. Carts were being loaded in front of
houses. Everything on wheels, from wagons to
perambulators, was being piled up. Everything
on four legs, dogs, cattle, horses, was being harnessed
and made to do its share in hauling. We left
the city, going back to the next point where the refugees
would be cared for. On either side of the road,
as far as eye could stretch, trenches had been dug,
barricades thrown up, blockades and wire-entanglements
constructed. It all lay very quiet beneath the
sunlight. It seemed a kind of preposterous pretence.
One could not imagine these fields as a scene of battle,
sweating torture and agony and death. I looked
back at the city, one of the most beautiful in France,
growing hazy in the distance with its spires and its
ramparts. Impossible! Then I remembered
the carts being hurriedly loaded and the uplifted
faces of those American girls. Where had I seen
their expression before? Yes. Strange that
they should have caught it! Their expression
was the same as that which I had noticed on the Tailleurs,
the Foreign Legion and the Moroccans—­the
crack troops of France.... So they had become
that already! At the first hint of danger, their
courage had taken command; they had risen into soldiers.

Page 77

Through villages swarming with troops and packed with
ordnance we arrived at an old caserne, which has been
converted into the children’s hospital of the
district. It is in charge of one of the first
of America’s children’s specialists.
While he works among the refugees, his wife, who is
a sculptress, makes masks for the facially mutilated.
He has brought with him from the States some of his
students, but his staff is in the main cosmopolitan.
One of his nurses is an Australian, who was caught
at the outbreak of hostilities in Austria and because
of her knowledge, despite her nationality, was allowed
to help to organise the Red Cross work of the enemy.
Another is a French woman who wears the Croix de Guerre
with the palm. She saved her wounded from the
fury of the Hun when her village was lost, and helped
to get them back to safety after it had been recaptured.
The Matron is Swedish and Belgian. The ambulance-drivers
are some of the American boys who saw service with
the French armies. In this group of workers there
are as many stories as there are nationalities.

If the workers have their stories, so have the five
hundred little patients. This barrack, converted
into a hospital, is full of babies, the youngest being
only six days old when I was there. Many of the
children have no parents. Others have lost their
mothers; their fathers are serving in the trenches.
It is not always easy to find out how they became
orphans; there are such plentiful chances of losing
parents who live continually under shell-fire.
One little boy on being asked where his mother was,
replied gravely, “My Mama, she is dead.
Les Boches, they put a gun to ’er ’ead.
She is finished; I ’ave no Mama.”

The unchildlike stoicism of these children is appalling.
I spent two days among them and heard no crying.
Those who are sick, lie motionless as waxen images
in their cots. Those who are supposedly well,
sit all day brooding and saying nothing. When
first they arrive, their faces are earth-coloured.
The first thing they have to be taught is how to be
children. They have to be coaxed and induced to
play; even then they soon grow weary. They seem
to regard mere playing as frivolous and indecorous;
and so it is in the light of the tragedies they have
witnessed. Children of seven have seen more of
horror in three years than most old men have read
about in a life-time. Many of them have been
captured by and recaptured from the Huns. They
have been in villages where the dead lay in piles
and not even the women were spared. They have
been present while indecencies were worked upon their
mothers. They have seen men hanged, shot, bayoneted
and flung to roast in burning houses. The pictures
of all these things hang in their eyes. When
they play, it is out of politeness to the kind Americans;
not because they derive any pleasure from it.

Page 78

Night is the troublesome time. The children hide
under their beds with terror. The nurses have
to go the rounds continually. If the children
would only cry, they would give warning. But instead,
they creep silently out from between the sheets and
crouch against the floor like dumb animals. Dumb
animals! That is what they are when first they
are brought in. Their most primitive instincts
for the beginnings of cleanliness seem to have vanished.
They have been fished out of caves, ruined dug-outs,
broken houses. They are as full of skin-diseases
as the beggar who sat outside Dives’ gate, only
they have had no dogs to lick their sores. They
have lived on offal so long that they have the faces
of the extremely aged. And their hatred!
Directly you utter the word “Boche,” all
the little night-gowned figures sit up in their cots
and curse. When they have done cursing, of their
own accord, they sing the Marseillaise.

Surely if God listens to prayers of vengeance, He
will answer the husky petitions of these victims of
Hun cruelty! The quiet, just, deep-seated venom
of these babies will work the Hun more harm than many
batteries. Their fathers come back from the trenches
to see them. On leaving, they turn to the American
nurses, “We shall fight better now,” they
say, “because we know that you are taking care
of them.”

When those words are spoken, the American Red Cross
knows that it is achieving its object and is winning
its war of compassion. The whole drive of all
its effort is to win the war in the shortest possible
space of time. It is in Europe to save children
for the future, to re-kindle hope in broken lives,
to mitigate the toll of unavoidable suffering, but
first and foremost to help men to fight better.

IV

THE LAST WAR

The last war! I heard the phrase for the first
time on the evening after Great Britain had declared
war. I was in Quebec en route for England, wondering
whether my ship was to be allowed to sail. There
had been great excitement all day, bands playing the
Marseillaise, Frenchmen marching arm-in-arm singing,
orators, gesticulating and haranguing from balconies,
street-corners and the base of statues.

Now that the blue August night was falling and every
one was released from work, the excitement was redoubled.
Quebec was finding in war an opportunity for carnival.
Throughout all the pyramided city the Tri-colour and
the Union Jack were waving. At the foot of the
Heights, the broad basin of the St. Lawrence was a-drift
in the dusk with fluttering pennons. They looked
like homing birds, settling in dovecotes of the masts
and rigging.

As night deepened, Chinese lanterns were lighted and
carried on poles through the narrow streets.
Troops of merry-makers followed them, blowing horns,
dragging bells, tin-cans, anything that would make
a noise and express high spirits. They linked
arms with girls as they marched and were lost, laughing
in the dusk. If a French reservist could be found
who was sailing in the first ship bound for the slaughter,
he became the hero of the hour and was lifted shoulder
high at the head of the procession. War was a
brave game at which to play. This was to be a
short war and a merry one. Down with the Germans!
Up with France! Hurrah for the entente cordiale!

Page 79

Beneath the coronet of stars on the Heights of Abraham
the spirit of Wolfe kept watch and brooded. It
was under these circumstances, that I heard the phrase
for the first time—­the last war.

The street was blocked with a gaping crowd. All
the faces were raised to an open window, two storeys
up, from which the frame had been taken out.
Inside the building one could hear the pounding of
machinery, for it was here that the most important
paper of Quebec was printed. Across a huge white
sheet a man on a hanging platform painted the latest
European cables. A cluster of electric lights
illuminated him strongly; but he was not the centre
of the crowd’s attention. In the window
stood another man. Like myself he was waiting
for his ship to sail, but not to England—­to
France. He was a returning French reservist.
Across the many miles of ocean the hand of duty had
stretched and touched him; he was ecstatically glad
that he was wanted. In those first days this
ecstasy of gladness was a little hard to understand.
Thank God we all share it instinctively now. He
was speaking excitedly, addressing the crowd.
They cheered him; they were in a mood to cheer anybody.
His face was thin with earnestness; he was a spirit-man.
He waved aside their applause with impatience.
He was trying to inspire them with his own intensity.
In the intervals between the shouting, I caught some
of his words, “I am setting out to fight the
last war—­the war of humanity which will
bring universal peace and friendship to the world.”

A sailor behind me spat. He was drunk and feeling
the need of sympathy. He began to explain to
me the reason. He was a fireman on one of the
steamers in the basin and a reservist in the British
Navy. He had received his orders that day to
report back in England for duty; he knew that he was
going to be torpedoed on his voyage across the Atlantic.
How did he know? He had had a vision. Sailors
always had visions before they were drowned.
It was to combat this vision that he had got drunk.

I shook him off irritably. One didn’t require
the superstitions of an alcoholic imagination to emphasize
the new terror which had overtaken the world.
There was enough of fear in the air already. All
this spurious gaiety—­what was it?
Nothing but the chatter of lonely children who were
afraid to listen to the silence—­afraid lest
they might hear the creaking footstep of death upon
the stairs. And these candles, lighting up the
fringes of the night—­they were nothing but
a vain pretence that the darkness had not gathered.

But this spirit-man framed in the window, he was genuine
and different. Yesterday we should have passed
him in the street unnoticed; to-day the mantle of
prophecy clothed him. Within two months he might
be dead—­horribly dead with a bayonet through
him. That thought was in the minds of all who
watched him; it gave him an added authority.
Yet he was not thinking of himself, of wounds, of
death; he was not even thinking of France. He
was thinking of humanity: “I am setting
out to fight the last war—­the war of humanity
which will bring universal peace and friendship to
the world.”

Page 80

Since the war started, how often have we heard that
phrase—­the last war! It became the
battle-cry of all recruiting-men, who would have fought
under no other circumstances, joined up now so that
this might be the final carnage. Nations left
their desks and went into battle voluntarily, long
before self-interest forced them, simply because organised
murder so disgusted them that they were determined
by weight of numbers to make this exhibition of brutality
the last.

Before Europe burst into flames in 1914, we believed
that the last war had been already fought. The
most vivid endorsement of this belief came out of
Germany in a book which, to my mind, up to that time
was the strongest peace-argument in modern literature.
It was so strong that the Kaiser’s Government
had the author arrested and every copy that could
be found destroyed. Nevertheless, over a million
were secretly printed and circulated in Germany, and
it was translated into every major European language.
The book I refer to was known under its American title
as, The Human Slaughter-House. It told
very simply how men who had played the army game of
sticking dummies, found themselves called upon to
stick their brother-men; how they obeyed at first,
then sickened at sight of their own handiwork, until
finally the rank and file on both sides flung down
their arms, banded themselves together and refused
to carry out the orders of their generals. There
was no declaration of peace; in that moment national
boundaries were abolished.

In 1912 this sounded probable. I remember the
American press-comments. They all agreed that
national prejudices had been broken down to such an
extent by socialism and friendly intercourse, that
never again would statesmen be able to launch attacks
of nations against nations. Governments might
declare war; the peoples whom they governed would
merely overthrow them. The world had become too
common-sense to commit murder on so vast a scale.

Had it? The world in general might have:
but Germany had not. The argument of The Human
Slaughter-House proposed by a German in protest
against what he foresaw was surely coming, turned out
to be a bad guess. It made no allowance for what
happens when a mad dog starts running through the
world. One may be tender-hearted. One may
not like killing dogs. One may even be an anti-vivisectionist;
but when a dog is mad, the only humanitarian thing
to do is to kill it. If you don’t, the
women and children pay the penalty.

We have had our illustration in Russia of what occurs
when one side flings away its arms, practising the
idealistic reasonings which this book propounds:
the more brutal side conquers. While the Blonde
Beast runs abroad spreading rabies, the only idealist
who counts is the idealist who carries a rifle on
his shoulder—­the only gospel to which the
world listens is the gospel which saviours are dying
for.

Page 81

The last war! It took us all by surprise.
We had believed so utterly in peace; now we had to
prove our faith by being prepared to die for it.
If we did not die, this war would not be the last;
it would be only the preface to the next. To
paraphrase the words of Mr. Wells, “We had been
prepared to take life in a certain way and life had
taken us, as it takes every generation, in an entirely
different way. We had been prepared to be altruistic
pacifists, and ...”

And here we are, in this year of 1918, engaged upon
the bloodiest war of all time, harnessing the muscle
and brain-power of the universe to one end—­that
we may contrive new and yet more deadly methods of
butchering our fellow men. The men whom we kill,
we do not hate individually. The men whom we
kill, we do not see when they are dead. We scald
them with liquid fire; we stifle them with gas; we
drop volcanoes on them from the clouds; we pull firing-levers
three, ten, even fifteen miles away and hurl them
into eternity unconfessed. And this we do with
pity in our hearts, both for them and for ourselves.
And why? Because they have given us no choice.
They have promised, unless we defend ourselves, to
snatch our souls from us and fashion them afresh into
souls which shall bear the stamp of their own image.
Of their souls we have seen samples; they date back
to the dark ages—­the souls of Cain, Judas
and Caesar Borgia were not unlike them. Of what
such souls are capable they have given us examples
in Belgium, captured France and in the living dead
whom they return by way of Evian. We would rather
forego our bodies than so exchange our souls.
A Germanised world is like a glimpse of madness; the
very thought strikes terror to the heart. Yet
it is to Germanise the world that Germany is waging
war to-day—­that she may confer upon us the
benefits of her own proved swinishness. There
is nothing left for us but to fight for our souls
like men.

The last war! We believed that at first, but
as the years dragged on the certainty became an optimism,
the optimism a dream which we well-nigh knew to be
impossible. We have always known that we would
beat Germany—­we have never doubted that.
But could we beat her so thoroughly that she would
never dare to reperpetrate this horror? Could
we prove to her that war is not and never was a paying
way of conducting business? Men began to smile
when we spoke of this war as the last. “There
have always been wars,” they said; “this
one is not the last—­there will be others.”

If it is not to be the last, we have cheated ourselves.
We have cheated the men who have died for us.
Our chief ideal in fighting is taken away. Many
a lad who moulders in a stagnant trench, laid down
his life for this sole purpose, that no children of
the future ages should have to pass through his Gethsemane.
He consciously gave himself up as a scapegoat, that
the security of human sanity should be safeguarded
against a recurrence of this enormity. The spirit-man,
framed in the dusky window above the applauding crowds
in Quebec, was typical of all these men who have made
the supreme sacrifice. His words utter the purpose
that was in all their hearts, “I am setting
out to fight the last war—­the war of humanity
which will bring universal peace and freedom to the
world.”

Page 82

That promise was becoming a lie; it is capable of
fulfilment now. The dream became possible in
April, 1917, when America took up her cross of martyrdom.
Great Britain, France and the United States, the three
great promise-keeping nations, are standing side by
side. They together, if they will when the war
is ended, can build an impregnable wall for peace
about the world. The plunderer who knew that it
was not Great Britain, nor France, nor America, but
all three of them united as Allies that he had to
face, no matter how tempted he was to prove that armed
force meant big business, would be persuaded to expand
his commerce by more legitimate methods. Whether
this dream is to be accomplished will be decided not
upon any battlefield but in the hearts of the civilians
of all three countries—­particularly in
those of America and Great Britain. The soldiers
who have fought and suffered together, can never be
anything but friends.

My purpose in writing this account of America in France
has been to give grounds for understanding and appreciation;
it has been to prove that the highest reward that
either America or Great Britain can gain as a result
of its heroism is an Anglo-American alliance, which
will fortify the world against all such future terrors.
There never ought to have been anything but alliance
between my two great countries. They speak the
same tongue, share a common heritage and pursue the
same loyalties. Had we not blundered in our destinies,
there would never have been occasion for anything
but generosity.

The opportunity for generosity has come again.
Any man or woman who, whether by design or carelessness,
attempts to mar this growing friendship is perpetrating
a crime against humanity as grave as that of the first
armed Hun who stepped across the Belgian threshold.
It were better for them that mill-stones were hung
about their necks and they were cast into the sea,
than ...

God is giving us our chance. The magnanimities
of the Anglo-Saxon races are rising to greet one another.
If those magnanimities are welcomed and made permanent,
our soldier-idealists will not have died in vain.
Then we shall fulfil for them their promise, “We
are setting out to fight the last war.”